Name: wrldpossibility

Title: Golden

Character/Relationships: Edward/Bella, Edward POV

Rating: PG

Warnings: None.

Golden

Whoever said silence is golden clearly never met Bella Swan.

Or loved her. Or felt the desperation of needing to figure her out. Even sitting inches apart across the lunchroom table, elbows on the Formica, bodies leaning toward one another, talking, the frustration is there, pounding on the door, demanding to be heard.

She frees one hand from where it s been pressed into service cupping her chin in order to raise it in emphasis, punctuating a point. "I think " she says carefully, finishing a thought she could just as easily left unspoken. "I feel..."

In other words, she's trying. And in the process, she s compensating for my greatest weakness, handing me pieces of the puzzle that is her and even so, I continually fumble them. She allows me to turn each thought, each feeling over in my hands before placing it in the bigger picture of her, and yet it s still not enough. Not even close.

And the irony is, I know it s not just me wishing to hear something-anything-from her mind: everyone, from her father to Mr. Banner to that despicable Mike Newton seems to hold his or her breath in her presence as though listening for the proverbial pin to drop, leaning in close, closer, closest (literally as well as metaphorically, of course) in an effort to gain even so much as one grain of insight into her thoughts.

But at least they re used to it. The silence. The wall between minds. To me, it s so much more unbearable: a fog that doesn't lift. A pillow that muffles to the point of my own suffocation. And when I muse to Alice that this must be what it s like to be deaf, I am not exaggerating the extent of my handicap when it comes to her.

When I think that just months ago, I might have longed for a break in the tedium of a cacophony of voices all vying for attention in my head, I almost laugh. Bitterly, of course. Which just makes matters worse, as I find myself unable to share my own thoughts. Because to get this joke, you really had to be there.

And so I succumb to the pack mentality. I lean in, and I listen, and I frown, and my brow creases with concentration just like the rest of them. And the loss of my own battles die on my lips, because when I m sitting here with her like this-face-to-face-we see anything but eye-to-eye.