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One of the very first things Bilbo Baggins learns is how to hide her soul mark.
Her mother makes her a soft covering that fits snuggly over her wrist, and her father commissions a multitude of lovely bangles and bracelets. Together, they cover all traces of blue ink on her skin.
Her parents tell her over and over again that soul marks are private things, to be secreted away and only ever shown to a single person. They tell her that she must never, under any circumstance, uncover her mark in public, or even speak of it, no matter what the other fauntlings do.
She is a Baggins of Bag End, and Bagginses never do anything unexpected or improper, which bearing your soul mark most assuredly is.
(They make no mention of the fact that she is also a Took, and that Tooks revel in doing things that are unexpected and adventurous.)
She doesn’t understand for a very long time just how unusual her situation really is.
After all, it’s rare enough for Hobbits to find a soulmate in a Man or an Elf, let alone a Dwarf. Personally, Bilbo thinks that Kìli is a perfectly fine name, even if she doesn’t know what to make of the strange rune that sits bellow it.
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As a faunt, there is nothing Bilbo enjoys more than a good adventure.
She runs off in search of Elves and Dwarves and Men in the Old Forest, and while she never does find any Elves or Dwarves she does find quite a few interesting Men. They introduce themselves as Rangers, and indulge her boundless curiosity as she pesters them about the places they’ve been and the people they’ve seen and the villains they’ve fought.
When she isn’t with her Ranger fiends, she is dirtying her skirts by roughhousing with the other boy-hobbits or climbing trees and getting twigs and leaves in her curls.
Her father complains of mud on the pantry floor of gossiping neighbors, but her mother only ever laughs and mends her skirts with deft hands, adding colorful designs and small embroidered Elves to cover the tears and the stains.
The residents of Hobbiton consider her a curiosity at best and a wild child at worst, for her notions of adventures and unladylike pursuits. Their opinion of her only worsens as she ages and refuses to let go of her Ranger friends and outgrow her boisterous nature, as all Tweens must.
It isn’t until after the Fell Winter that they get their wish.
The price is her father’s life.
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Bilbo doesn’t have the energy to think of adventures or soulmates after the Fell Winter, not with the many burials and funerals.
Her father is buried hastily, with so many others that Bilbo stops looking at faces. She doesn’t want to know which of her neighbors is being buried alongside her father, which of her friends she won’t be able to see come spring.
There is too much to do to give any time to anything but survival.
Her mother especially isn’t the same afterwards. There is a piece of Belladonna that lies in the ground alongside her husband, and nothing Bilbo does could ever bring it back.
Belladonna fades a little more each day, uncaring in the face of a world without her soulmate. She persist longer than most would expect, and does so for her daughter.
Belladonna Baggins, née Took dies eight years after her husband, and Bilbo is alone.
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Bilbo is twenty nine when her mother dies, leaving her the Master of Bag End. She isn’t yet an adult, still four years away from her majority, but she manages well enough amidst the mutters of her neighbours.
The Sackville-Bagginses especially would like nothing better than to have her declared unable to properly care for the large Smial her parents left her, leaving them to inherit it. That’s enough incentive to make Bilbo get up in the mornings and do what must be done, at least the beginning.
Eventually, she finds other things worth living for, like her books and her father’s maps and her mother’s embroidery and her favorite cousins. She wraps her Baggins propriety around herself like a shroud, shielding herself from the snide remarks and the rumours. She distances herself from her Took cousins, learns to content herself with walking holidays instead of the adventures she used to dream of.
Sometimes, in the privacy of her bedroom, she removes her bangles and bracelets and unfastens her coverings to trace her soulmark with her fingertips, and wonders.
The marks are still as vivid as ever, the runes as foreign to her as the first time she saw them. She wonders what her bondmate is like, what they look like and what they are doing. She wonders what they would think of her, and she wonders what it is about her that makes her compatible with a Dwarf.
A part of her wants nothing more than to run out her front door and find the Dwarf whose name is engraved on her skin.
But she is a Baggins of Bag end, and that is what she will remain, and where she will stay.
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Bilbo is fifty, a spinster living alone in her great big smial when Gandalf visits the Shire.
She remembers him fondly as a fount, as a wonderful story teller and a producer of stellar fireworks.
She doesn’t keep the same opinion as he talks over her about adventures and how going on one would be good for her and amusing for him. How rude!
Naturally, he doesn’t hear a word of her protests, and brings a company of twelve rude dwarves to her Smial for supper the next evening.
They are unexpected and uninvited, barging into her Hobbit-hole without care for her protests and making themselves right at home by raiding her pantry and eating all her food. They make a mess of things and track mud all over the place with their great big boots. They leave their weapons where she can stumble over them and drop their packs and coats where they will. They even have the nerve to create a mocking song about her, when she gets upset about their improper use of her mother’s fine china.
And yet, she can’t stay upset for long, not when they seem so very happy to be together, and especially not when they sing of their lost home.
It helps, certainly, that she’s in shock at finally meeting her bondmate.
