bound & determined au: traditions and terminology
The "Bound and Determined" universe(s) were co-created by myself and
helens78. They're modern AUs with mutant abilities, soulbonds, and a prevailing D/s-everywhere culture in Europe and North America. While there are mutants, there aren't "superheroes" as depicted in Marvel comics.
This is primarily an X-Men: First Class AU, but it includes other Marvel characters. Characterizations and backgrounds are primarily drawn from the Marvel movieverse. But we've discussed applying the premise and principles of this verse to different scenarios in a variety of fandoms with lots of characters. So here's that premise and those principles spelled out.
How Soulbonds Work
The soulbond itself is psionic energy. The majority of people in the Bound & Determined verse have an extra psionic sense that gives them empathy for their soulmates. (That means virtually everyone in the Bound & Determined verse is a mutant compared to us.)
The psionic energy of the bond connects the two nearest people who are most biologically compatible (in the sense that they are the most likely to ensure each others' reproductive success) at the time that one or both are hitting puberty. Most frequently, bondmates are around 100-800 miles apart, but some people might have to cross oceans to find their bondmates, while others might find theirs next door.
It's very very rare but not completely unknown for a bond to be shared by more than two people. Becoming bonded to another person after a bondmate's death is likewise very rare but has also been recorded, and a dozen or so modern cases documented. However most traditions consider it impossible and/or verboten that the bond might connect more than two people, or happen more than once. Culturally, your soulmate is the one and only person for you, and you're expected to spend your entire life together.
~92% of people are or have been bonded.
76% identify as dom/sub pairs. The other 16% are dom/dom, sub/sub, and bonds that include switches and/or people with no orientation. 73% are male/female bonds, 9% female/female, 8% male/male, and 2% involve one or both partners with other gender identities.
Usually people start to feel their bonds around puberty. It's stronger if the other bondmate has already hit puberty or is also going through it.
Bondmates can feel one another's emotions and presence, and can often feel when they're getting closer or further away. This gets stronger with age, then declines somewhat. On average, this sense is most attuned from around 17-28 for men and 19-36 for women.
Current scientific thinking in the verse is that the soulbond began as a random mutation that became a successful adaptation. Soulmates who could sense one another's proximity and emotions were more likely to protect each other and their offspring. Therefore they reproduced successfully at a higher rate than those without the bond, and spread the bond mutation. The bond evolved in a balance of factors: the majority of bonds form between the most compatible people within a distance that was achievable on foot to our ancestors, and beneficial to the population. For example, mates traveling 100+ miles to find their soulmates has helped promote positive genetic diversity.
Charles's doctoral thesis presented a convincing argument that soulbonds tend to pair people whose offspring introduce potentially favorable mutations into the gene pool. (While same-sex bonds don't produce offspring, Charles cited accepted data showing that bonded people live longer on average. Monogamy is a relatively recent concept in evolutionary terms, and in addition to opposite-sex bonds, evolution has also selected for same-sex bonds because bonded people have more chances to reproduce, even if it's not with their bondmates.)
Charles further posited that the increased rate of X-gene mutations and the more dramatic nature of those mutations in the past century have come about largely due to improvements in communication and transportation that have made it easier for larger numbers of far-flung bondmates to find one another than in the past. Bonded parents who produced X-gene positive children had to travel significantly greater distances to find one another, statistically.
Soulbond Traditions (North American/European)
When bondmates find each other, their first urge is to consummate and spend around three days having sex, in what's sometimes informally called a seeker rush or a seeking high. To counter that instinct, traditions have developed around the process of feeling, finding, meeting and uniting with one's soulmate.
Emergence. The formal term for when the bond is first felt. A.k.a. "sparking," and people are a lot more likely to say "I felt the bond" or "I'm sparking" than "I'm emerging." In observant Catholic communities, young people aren't supposed to talk about their emergence before confirmation. In observant Jewish communities, young people are expected not to discuss their emergence until after bar/bat mitzvah. In most other NA/Euro traditions there are similar delimiters; emergence isn't discussed until 12/13. Even in secular/pop culture there's an undefined but strong sense that kids shouldn't start talking about emergence until after they turn 12 at the earliest. Naturally most kids interpret all this as "Don't talk about it with adults before age 12/13/whenever."
Though the bond is usually first felt around puberty, people are expected to wait, and only go looking for their bondmates once they reach whatever age is locally considered to be the age of consent.
Soul's-home, a.k.a. the joining spot, is an area at the back of the head, a palm-size spot at the lower curve of the skull, roughly in the position of the occipital bone. In bonded people, this spot becomes sensitive during emergence, and it seems to responds to changes in the bond, though some of the sensations are psychosomatic. Feelings of heat, tingling, and itching are common. The joining spot is eroticized due to its heightened sensitivity and the association with the soulbond. Some traditions dictate growing the hair long and/or wearing particular hairstyles that cover soul's-home. Most dressy hairdos call attention to the joining spot, either by somewhat exposing it, as with a ponytail, or by covering it, as with a chignon. In the heyday of the punk movement, the most transgressive hairstyles involved shaving the joining spot. Cupping each other at soul's-home while kissing is the most common image of romance between soulmates.
Seeking. Setting out to find one's soulmate, following the "pull" of psionic energy from the bond. Traditionally, people would seek in the summer months, between planting and harvest time. In modern Euro/NA, where there's more leisure and easier travel in wintertime, it's considered most romantic to try to find one's bondmate around Valentine's Day, or at least sometime in February.
Occasionally bondmates get close enough to identify each other, but then delay actually meeting until February 14th; that happens more often in TV/movies than real life. The cliche is for bondmates to spot each other and make a heart with their fingers to indicate that they should come back and meet at the same spot on Valentine's Day. Other TV/movie cliches include bondmates who find each other before February, silently agree to meet later, then lose each other before they can meet again. Also: a dom spotting eir sub and eagerly going to claim em, only for the sub to flash the heart sign, so that the crestfallen dom has to cool eir heels til the 14th.
Seeker buses are networks of buses that crisscross the country. People take seeker buses when they're looking for their soulmates. Flying is too expensive for most seekers, who tend to overshoot and have to backtrack when traveling by plane. The buses are almost always cheaper than driving around in a car burning gas, too. And seeker bus trips have become something of an expected rite of passage, particularly in the US. The buses travel somewhat slowly to let seekers feel whether they're getting closer to their mates. On a four-lane highway the second lane from the right is sometimes called the "seeker lane" because seeker buses usually take it, and they travel at the speed limit or a little below.
Reception. When they meet, bondmates are traditionally expected to introduce their bondmate to their families ASAP. The soulmate is received into the family. At this stage, there's cultural pressure on the family to accept the bondmate no matter what. Denying reception happens rarely, though it's an occasional plot device in romances and dramas.
It used to be expected that the bondmates would go to the submissive partner's family first, and the dominant would ask the submissive's dominant parent for permission to recognize (because back then reception was basically the same as an engagement.) Now, couples often go first to whoever's immediate family is closest.
Acknowledgement. Before they spend their first night together, the bondmates are meant to acknowledge their new bond with witnesses present. This used to be anything from just another brief part of the family reception, to a big announcement to the community. At present, what it usually means is that the new bondmates throw a party and invite family and friends. These days often the bondmates throw their party long after their actual acknowledgement night; the acknowledgement party is more like an engagement party in our world.
Acknowledgement night is the first full night the bonded couple spends together. This isn't called consummation because it doesn't necessarily involve sex (and in some traditions, sex is frowned on before recognition and/or marriage, so sometimes the acknowledgement night is specifically not supposed to include sex.)
Sleeping together for the first time-- as in, actually zzz sleeping in close physical proximity, generally meaning, the same bed-- has a notable effect on most bonded couples. The bond gets both stronger and easier to control after their acknowledgement night. The more they sleep together, the more the couple can choose what to share with each other through the bond, and they can share more easily and strongly.
Many bonded couples feel compelled to be close to each other on the anniversary of their acknowledgement night, regardless of their relationship for the rest of the year. For some, being apart on that day can have mental and physical effects, from mild to debilitating.
If the family has some kind of problem with the bond, usually it doesn't come out during reception, but in maneuvers to prevent the acknowledgement night or stop the pair from recognizing.
Recognition. This is the legal registration of the bond. In B&D verse, marriage is strictly a cultural and/or church affair, not a legal matter. Recognition is the legal commitment between bondmates. In most of North America and Europe, after considerable political struggle, recognition is also available to unbonded couples who want to legally commit to each other. However, most traditional churches still won't marry an unbonded couple.
Renouncing. Some people reject their bonds, for whatever reason. It's seldom possible to break a bond completely. Some very powerful psychic mutants can do it; psionics who are able to interrupt a soulbond are vanishingly rare in real life, and fewer still are willing, but they're a relatively common plot device in dramas.
Typically, renouncing involves learning to block the bond. In Judeo-Christian traditions this usually involves a week of one-on-one spiritual counseling and intensive prayer. Another approach in some traditions involves a week of meditation. A totally secular method is a week of bond therapy which involves many of the same basic techniques without the spiritual elements. People who are serious about renouncing sometimes fast or go into sensory deprivation to meditate, which can accelerate and strengthen the block for some.
There are now also bond-blocking drugs, like Xinitac, which change neurochemistry enough to obviate the effect of the bond. The drugs don't typically interrupt the bond itself, just cushion the bondmate from feeling it. However, in some patients, bond-blocking drugs can change neurochemistry enough that the bond is interrupted and/or the patient can't feel the bond even after discontinuing use of the drug.
Mourning sleep. When one bondmate dies, the other almost always falls unconscious shortly after, going into a coma-like state for about a day. Other injuries or illnesses befalling a bondmate can knock someone out, but generally if ey sleeps six hours or more, it means eir bondmate has died.
D/s Traditions (North American/European)
Supposedly the modern view is that the dominant only has as much power in the relationship as the submissive consents to cede. In practice, subs are still subtly and sometimes overtly expected to defer to their dominants. Keeping pace with movements for civil rights and women's rights, there has been a "sub's lib" movement. It's now called "role equality."
The social attitudes about dominants and submissives don't replace those about men and women, or supplant any of the -isms from our world; rather, dom-sub roles add another axis to the various intersections of privilege-oppression. This is also true of the mutant-baseline axis. X-gene mutants face discrimination in BD verse but it varies dramatically depending on the nature of the mutation and how it's identified.
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~75% of dominants are male/male-identified and ~70% of submissives are female/female-identified: however, roles are self-defined, and women, particularly female switches, receive social encouragement to identify as subs, while men and especially male switches get the same encouragement to identify as doms.
In some traditions (considered pretty hardass nowadays,) a dominant is expected to submit to a more experienced dominant for at least a few weeks and receive approval from the dom ey subbed to, before ey exerts dominance over a sub emself. This largely turned into an apprenticing tradition, in which an apprentice dom probably wouldn't formally submit to the mentor dom, but would perform some submissive services in exchange for training (such as caring for dungeon furniture and BDSM gear.) That in turn fell out of common practice as people instead sought out concordance education in schools.
Concordance is the formal umbrella term for power exchange, BDSM, and sex. As an academic subject, concordance encompasses the psychology of domination and submission, social theories of power exchange, the history of concordance practices, familiarity with and use and care of standard dungeon supplies, and sexual and painplay techniques.
Power exchange and D/s are typical colloquial terms for domination and submission.
In current mores, when a sub first offers emself to a dominant, the polite way for the dom to accept is to say "Thank you for the honor of your submission." The sub's polite response is, "Thank you for the gift of your care and dominance." In casual encounters this is sometimes shortened to "Thank you for the honor"/"Thank you for the gift" or dispensed with altogether.
A frequent trope in rough porn has a submissive repeatedly saying, or being forced to say, "Thank you for the gift" without ever getting the corresponding words from the dominant.
Basic sex or, more rudely, mammal sex are typical terms for sex without painplay or power exchange. In the Bound & Determined universe, basic sex is widely regarded as perverse and immature. As the slang 'mammal sex' suggests, it's disdained as wanton animal rutting.
Orientation refers to whether a person is submissive or dominant. It's not used for sexuality. In Europe and North America, the default assumption is that people are bisexual, unless they specifically say they're heterosexual, gay, asexual or otherwise identified.
Typed/mistyped. 'Typing' is judging someone as a dom or sub on sight. In this verse, most people think it's easy to tell right away based on stereotypes of appearance and behavior. 'Typism' is the term for treating people differently depending on whether they're perceived as doms or subs.
D/s contracts occur between unbonded/pre-bonded subs and dominants, or people with open bonds who might have some reason to want serious play with someone outside the bond. Generally the contract plays out, and then a pre-determined length of time afterwards is set up for discussing the contract, and talking about renewal, if that's an option.
Charles & Erik's bond
Due to their mutations, Charles and Erik's bond has unusual aspects.
Because Erik intuitively feels magnetic fields, his sense of direction is heightened, and that also applies to his perception of the bond. He knows relatively early what direction Charles is in, and feels Charles's location fairly strongly from a young age. If Erik had gone seeking as early as 14, he would have found Charles (even without Charles's telepathy to help.)
Meanwhile, as a telepath, Charles perceives psionic energy from everyone around him, not just his distant bondmate. That makes Erik's location less evident to him when they're teenagers. Too much psychic "interference" from others keeps him from getting a clear read on where Erik's coming from, since all those other minds are much closer and Erik is so far away. If Charles had gone seeking Erik, up until age 18 or so, he would have had a lot of trouble finding him.
Even so, the bond signifies that psionically speaking, they're particularly in tune with one another, and as a result of that affinity, Charles's telepathy can reach Erik at a much greater distance than anyone else.
Their bond is unusually strong. Both of them have more psionic energy than a baseline human, and of course Charles has a lot more. Charles's telepathy also contributes to the strength of their bond because he's accustomed to perceiving emotions from the people around him, so he can decipher a lot of subtleties in the feelings he gets from Erik, and the emotions he sends to Erik through the bond are similarly nuanced. Where a baseline teenager might only be able to feel that eir bondmate is unhappy, Charles could feel the difference between grief, frustration, wistfulness, nostalgia, loneliness... a much more detailed spectrum of emotions.
Charles's mutation also gives him heightened mental capacity, including the ability to sustain more than one train of thought at a time. (Otherwise he wouldn't be able to handle all the input of others' thoughts and feelings and still function.) Baseline humans generally have to devote most of their attention to the bond when they're trying to understand their bondmate's feelings or sending their own feelings through the bond.
But Charles could almost always devote a thread of his attention to the bond, while also paying full attention to other things at the same time. Meanwhile, Erik is a genius in his own right and has some of the same multitasking ability that Charles has, to a lesser extent; in his case that adaptation allows him to concentrate even while perceiving metal and magnetic fields all around him.
When they're split apart, the psionic energy drain affects them both. Erik loses most of his magnetism. And though he's less impaired and retains strong telepathy, Charles loses virtually all his active abilities to change memories and control minds.
If you're curious about any of this, feel free to ask! We put a lot of thought into the verse, and these are just the foundational basics.
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