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The moment she locked eyes with the unreadable boy, Bella Swan knew that her life was going to get infinitely more difficult. She hadn’t noticed, at first, that she couldn’t read him - she was in a cafeteria, a hub of conversation and thoughts around her, everything so unbearably loud, even beneath her hood and headphones blaring soothing whale sounds, which, to her chagrin, weren’t working. She wished she could go outside, into the woods, and walk until she was out of range from human life - but that would get her suspended, probably, and she’d get sent back to Arizona on Renee’s command, and things would be so much worse. Even noisier.
She was sitting, slumped against a wall because she hadn’t managed being invited to a table, and she was picking at her lunch tray, chipping the skin of an apple with her jagged fingernails, resisting the urge to pop a pimple rubbing against her neck. The girl was thinking, at the moment, that Forks, Washington might not be so bad, despite her immediate and thorough outcasting from the social crowd - she’d foolishly, hopefully, thought that her school troubles were behind her, and that she could live out her senior year in peace - and than Bella had chanced a glance up, and she’d caught the full stare of a pale boy whose blank mind slammed into her like a bag of bricks.
The people around him must’ve been siblings, she gleaned from their muddled, oddly layered thinking process, and they were - vampires? Not human, in the least. Strange, she thought, but nothing new to the girl who had been able to read minds from the moment of her birth. In a way, she was just as weird as them, though that was indulgent. Shoving aside her impending discovery about the state of a supernatural reality, the girl turned her attention back to the boy, who is staring back at her with almost the same amount of horror in his perfect, bronze gaze. He was still as a statue- and his siblings' thoughts were going wild as they, weird girl and perfect vampire, stared at each other in perfect horrified harmony from across the cafeteria.
His name is Edward . Bella learns this in the next few seconds, blinking and carefully tuning her mind into the thoughts of the coven - because that's what they called themself, as the word flashed through the little, pixie-like girl’s mind. The coven was throwing thoughts and questions, directed at - Edward? Around the table. They think fast , she thought, fully giving into her urge to scratch at her neck furiously, earning her a few disgusted looks. The coven was asking Edward, through their thoughts, pointedly, why he’d stared at her - she strained her mind for a response, even taking off her ineffectual headphones, and scarily enough, though he must respond in a whispered murmur, because their thoughts fly through their minds like furious hornets, carrying words like mindless, he can’t read her, dangerous, kill, human, dangerous, what do we do, Alice - she still can not catch a single peep of conscious from the boy. He is as mindless as a rock.
Is it purposeful? Maybe - but why the confusion? No, not purposeful. He can read minds. Bella has established that. But he can not read hers - and that is good, she thinks, but she can’t read his mind, which is bad. What a conundrum. Bella Swan sits on that cafeteria floor, scratching at her neck and thinking long enough that she’s almost the last to leave the room. A mindless boy. Edward Cullen, the mindless boy. Like a stone, she marvels. Inanimate. Blank. A wall - not a wall, she decides, finally rising, tucking her bloody hand into her pocket - a void of a boy. Nothing at all.
Edward Cullen hates Bella Swan. It is official, he decided, boring a hole into the side of the girl’s head, not the barest trace of her mind slipping from behind her thin curtain of dark hair. He can’t tell whether or not she’s sleeping. He wanted to wrench her head up from where it was knelt, nose to table, to the assignment. She’s strange, of that he’s certain - he wanted to coin her a typical basket case, absorbed in her own oversized hoodie and dirty hair and issues, maybe drugs, but he can’t do any of that, because he can’t read her, and he is frustrated. Who are you? He wanted to scream, but he restrained himself, pleasantly pushing his trembling hand to scribble down a mindless answer.
Slathering on a cheerful voice, he tried to turn to her, make conversation. To get in her head, in the smallest of ways, despite his initial failure. “Difficult assignment, huh?” He asks, and feels his eye twitch when she murmurs out a sound inaudible to human ears that he knows is an affirmative, to get him to stop talking. Irritating girl. “Do you like it so far, here in Forks?” He plows onwards, and she peels her greasy face from the paper, every singular pore of her face visible to his superior eyesight. He scrambled for her eyes, a handhold in the situation - she has dark eyes, like two holes punched out of a mottled paper-white face by a pencil.
“It’s okay” she says, and stares in his eyes for much longer than is humanly appropriate. If he were a human, he might be freaked out - as an irritated vampire, he takes it as a challenge from this impudent, mindless human girl, who has dared to disrupt a century of monotonous everything with a mind of nothing at all. Looking at her is like looking into a void - nothing but blackness stares back at him. He hears not even a whisper. He sees nothing.
“Why’d you move here? Problems at home?” He shamelessly asked, past the point of politeness, and he noticed, absently, that her twitching hand, wrapped in the gray of her hoodie material, has blood beneath its jagged nail bed. He quickly linked it to the bloody sore against her neck - he feels his mouth involuntarily fill with venom, which he pushes past in pursuit of his curiosity, though he knows his eyes drop a few shades, until they almost match her own in shade. She is still looking into his eyes while she answers. Her breath doesn’t smell like tobacco - it smells like mint. Maybe a nervous gum chewer, in addition to her scratching. Compulsive behavior. He wishes he could read her mind.
She says, drawn out and stilted, “You’re not good at this. I moved here because it’s small.” She moves her head back to the flat surface of the paper, unaware or maybe uncaring of how much she’s incensed him with her blunt, unhelpful answer, and the conversation closes at a low point. He catches another murmur, from her squished cheeks - she wishes the room wasn’t so loud.
Theirs is the only conversation that’s happened almost all period, in the face of the stern substitute teacher. It has been whispered. Even now, the classroom is physically silent, though the cacophony of thought streams is, as always, irritating to Edward. He absently wishes it wasn’t so loud. He wonders what this daft girl is on about, the noise in the room. She doesn’t even know how noisy it can get, he thinks, with a surprising amount of malice coloring his statement. She groans again, drawing their table a few baffled looks, and clasps her hands over her ears. He can hear a wheeze in her throat - a sign that she wanted to cry. More unbacked insight.
The room is dead silent, and her mind is a void of nothingness, an ominous sign of something being wrong. Bella Swan has just made herself his unwitting enemy.
Bella Swan had always been strange. Strange and sensitive, the two words most commonly ascribed to her in others streams of consciousness. Special, too. Bella Swan was strange, sensitive, and special. She had never actually told anyone of her power - scared, or secretive or some other s-word, she thought, too much and too little to ever tell anyone. Scared of disbelief, no, because she could prove her claims. Maybe the girl was scared of being believed. Maybe that would be worse. People knowing that she heard everything, all the time. So, she persisted, strange and silent and waiting for the day she could turn eighteen and vanish off the face of civilization, retreat to a life rotting in the woods, alone. Blessed.
Back in Phoenix, Bella had earned herself the reputation of being a crying, dirty girl, who was constantly in shambles, pushing the limits of her anxiety diagnosis, and generally, being a miserable wreck hidden under the skin of a teenager. The world was loud, forever, when she needed it to be quiet. Nobody could understand - how could they? Even Renee, her joyful, youthful mother, had been tired of her, her problems - the woman would never admit it, but she thought of it, and thought was the most important thing in Bella’s life - until the absence of it, in Forks, in the form of a boy named Edward, snatched the rug from beneath her feet.
Bella Swan, despite her power, was not good at understanding people, beyond hearing their every passing notion. She didn’t wish to understand people, so loud and so much. She had, however, been the certified weird, friendless girl for her entire life - and she was intimately familiar with the idea that people disliked her, so she knew, of course, that Edward Cullen, in the week following her arrival, hated her the way a scientist hated a useless test subject. He stared at her so often - trying to pierce her mind, no doubt, and read her thoughts. She wished she had an answer for him. She was tempted to tell him, to commiserate, that she couldn’t hear him either. She was frustrated too. But the thought of engaging in conversation over all the noise of school gave her a headache, so she kept her answers to his persistent questions short and blunt, hoping that he lost interest so she could go back to counting down the days to her future blankness in excruciating detail.
She was in the parking lot. Walking to her car. Charlie got her a car. He was nice. Her father’s thoughts were nice. Smooth, quiet, nice. Not too loud, but still grating. She wished he could be silent, like Edward. Edward hated her, but she was just frustrated. The girl wished everyone was like Edward, mindless, hatred aside. She figured she would never find out why he was different. She wished she knew why he was different. Sad, but true. She was walking, until she noticed frantic thoughts around her, dangerous thoughts, and she risked a glance out the side of her over-large hood, and oh, an out of control truck was rolling towards her, driven by a boy whose mind was doing a fair impression of a tornado alarm. She didn’t even make an attempt to move, watching blankly as the vehicle barrelled towards her.
She’s slammed onto the ground, and the truck, when she peers up, has been stopped by a hand-shaped dent courtesy of void Edward Cullen himself, who is staring down at her and back at his hand like he can’t believe what he’s done. Maybe he didn’t mean to save her. He looked down at her, again, and his face smoothed into a mask of polite disinterest, like he didn’t zip across the parking lot in front of a group of teenagers. If she’s found anything from digging through his vampire sibling’s cleaning minds, it’s that Edward Cullen is a great liar - he’ll lie his way out of this one.
She’s taken to the hospital. Bella pushes away the nurses and doesn’t even bat an eye at the platinum blond doctor, who, she gathers, is Edward’s adoptive father, but also a vampire named Carlisle who is currently concerned with the idea of the poor human teenager having a concussion, due to her inactivity, and Edward’s lurking status at her bedside. “I’m fine” she says, just to quiet Carlisle’s frantic thoughts, which fails. Useless. She turns her mind to her newest scab, partially hidden beneath her wristband. She picks at it, until her hand is gently drawn away by the cold, concerned hand of the doctor. He wishes her father was here. He’s going to talk to Charlie about her. She presses her hands to her ears when he turns away, fruitlessly attempting to bury her head in her lap, ignoring the strange, heated look of Edward. Sometimes her attempts work. Most times they don’t. He’s not good at acting human. He’s splintering the wood of the bedside table.
She’s released. She thinks she’s glad. As she’s leaving the hospital, leaving Charlie to talk with the doctor, she’s cornered by Edward. His gaze is intense. He hates her so much. They’re at a corner of a hospital, near the geriatic ward. The patients have nice, quiet, tempered thoughts. A lifetime of practice with thinking, these people. She sort of likes old people. If she weren’t planning to leave human society the first moment possible, being a geriatic nurse might be nice. That, or working with animals. Animals are mindless, and beautiful, and she loves them all so much, blessedly quiet and soft and warm. He’s talking to her. She tries to focus.
“You didn’t see anything” he demands of her, and she looks up at him from her fringe, her fingers scratching at her inner-wrist scab. She doesn’t really know what to say. She said, plainly, “You’re not good at acting.” He scoffs, seemingly disgusted. He raises his hand - fake menacingly, just to plant it in a loose fist above her head. A threat, given what she’s seen of him. She should be scared. She doesn’t get scared. She blinks up at him as he repeats his previous command, eyes black. “You’re not good at acting. Neither are your siblings.” She wiggles her body away from his gaze, which is morphing from furious to a little stunned in the face of her plain indifference, and she traipses down the hall, enjoying the tempered thoughts around her.
She leaves the nothingness of Edward Cullen in a hospital corridor, and thinks nothing of it.
Bella Swan has the audacity to ignore him. That has to be what she’s doing, after her ominous statement - she must be purposefully ignoring him, and his patience is getting thinner and thinner by the day. His last straw is a mundane field trip to a greenhouse, where he slithers his way into being partners with Bella, an easy task, as the rest of the class avoids her like she’s carrying the Spanish Death. She’s odd, he supposes, too odd for humans, with her constant crying and worrying over nothing at all. He’s being so nice to her - pushing the boundaries of his patience, and she is staring out the window of the bus, red eyes twitching minutely. She is somehow the most rude and self-absorbed human he has ever met, in addition to her mindlessness. Great.
He’s done with this. He will get concrete answers out of her, even if he has to scare her - because she must be scared, this girl, or she must feel nothing at all. To corral her into the woods surrounding the greenhouse is the easiest thing on his wishlist he’s completed in a while, ignoring the little moral Carlisle of his consciousness, that whispers that bringing the human teenager that his Father had spent a whole dinner mentally fretting over, into the woods to scare her into answering his questions about her intentions is the worst thing he’s done in a while.
When they are finally far off enough that the minds of their classmates are nothing but distant whispers to Edward, he whirls on her. Against the tree-bark, that’s where he stalks her, allowing his unnatural countenance to glisten in the light, bellowing, daring her to expose him, for what he is, he knows that she knows, this strange, void human. She knows, and she will tell Edward everything he wants to know. She will.
She stares at him. She unzips her hoodie, and slides down against the tree. Bella Swan tells him in the quietest voice he’s heard in a while, that she’s like him. If his face could flush with anger, it would. Foolish human, he says, tapping into his dramatic instincts - we are not the same in the slightest. Say what I am. Say it.
“You’re like me” Bella Swan says, picking at the grass poking around worn gym shoes, “You can hear them too. I know you do. I hear your siblings. You can’t hear me. I can’t hear you. I hear everyone think.” Somehow, a wave of ice floods through his veins, and he stops posturing, and, in a flash, is at her side, similarly dropping himself to the floor despite how foolish he feels.
She continues talking, though from the way she catches out of breath periodically, he guesses she’s not used to much conversation. What she says is shaping up to look horrifyingly true. She tells him, in intimate detail, knowledge that only members of the Cullen clan would be privy to, and when she’s done, she tells him about their classmates, information he already knows, also constantly subjected to their musings. His hatred, born of his single-minded frustration, drips away from him like candle wax. He’s an idiot.
“The world is too loud” she finishes off, turning to him with her black hole eyes, and he finds himself speechless. The first person in a century he cannot hear, and it is a girl who is cursed in the same way he is - possibly the only person on Earth who can ever really understand him, because despite what the coven claims, they have always thought him strange. They could never know what it’s like, to feel and be everything all the time. For even the silentest of rooms to be unbearably loud. To wake up, bombarded with thoughts not your own, and to, some days, now know where the line between where you end and another begins is. To be born, vampire or human, and to Know too much. To be everything all the time, unwillingly.
He lays his head against the bark. He lets out a humorless laugh. He takes the liberty of stopping Bella’s hand from scratching into her irritated neck, catching and tangling it with his own. She obliges. She even leans closer. He kisses their tangled hands, fielding her interested stare with a promise of later explanation. Neither of them is used to not knowing things, he thinks bemusedly. This black-eyed girl - this is his kin, a brethren to his soul. “It is too loud, isn’t it” he agrees in a whisper, and she lays her head against his shoulder.
They’re going to be in trouble when they go back to the group. Edward doesn’t care. Bella and he are all silent, voice and mind alike, and the world is blessedly quiet around them.