inmh
in
twispitefic
Spitefic: Wake-Up Call
Title: Wake-Up Call
Author: inmh
Fandom(s): New Moon, Smallville
Rating: PG-13/T
Word Count: 3,062
Inspiration: Smallville is just so saturated with badass women who do not take crap from anyone (And yet still retain enough vulnerability to make them relatable), I had to do something with at least one of them kicking Bella’s ass. I’ve already got a massive girl-crush on Tess and have her featured in many an in-progress story, so I figured I should use someone else for this one. AND THUS LOIS WAS CHOSEN FOR THE HOLY TASK. :D
Warnings: Language
Summary: Smallville crossover, set during New Moon. When nothing else worked, Charlie decided to call his niece in order to find a way to snap Bella out of her self-destructive zombie-funk.
Disclaimer: I don't own Smallville. It belongs to Jerry Siegal, Joe Shuster and the CW. Twilight belongs to Stephenie Meyer.
"You're going to Kansas."
Bella stared at Charlie. "What?"
"I said you're going to Kansas. You're going to visit with your cousin Lois." Bella was both relieved and confused; the way Charlie had worded it before, he'd made it sound like he was sending her to live there, like he had when he'd said he was going to send her to Jacksonville. The confusion came in because… It was Kansas. And she hadn't seen her older cousin in five years.
"…Why am I going to Kansas to visit Lois?"
Charlie's eyes narrowed further. "You are going to Kansas," He said, "Because I just got a call from Mrs. Stanley with a very interesting story about what happened when you went out with Jessica the other night."
Bella's eyes rolled shut. God, Jessica was already acting like a bitch for what had happened in Port Angeles, why did Charlie have to jump on her back too? "Dad, that wasn't-"
Charlie cut her off with a raised hand. "I don't want to hear it. I do not want to hear it, Bella. God knows I've tried to help you, God knows I've tried to understand how you're feeling, but it's just not working. Maybe Lois will be able to get through to you. Do me a favor and level with her, all right? She's been through break-ups before. She probably knows what you're going through."
Bella didn't respond as Charlie then told her to pack and left the room, but she was incensed. How could he just assume that Lois knew what this felt like? What Bella and Edward had had was special. Unique. Their love was destined to be: They were meant for each other. She had been the first human whose scent had ever affected Edward so strongly! That had to mean something, even if he was gone.
Lois was loud and strong and proud. Though she was also loving, her overbearing and sometimes over-the-top personality tended to make her a chore to deal with. Bella was not surprised that her cousin had cycled through a number of boyfriends over her lifetime. How could she possibly understand the heartache of losing a soul-mate, someone she was meant to stay with forever?
All the same, this was just a trip and it could have been worse. So Bella begrudgingly pulled out her suitcase and started to pack.
()()
The car ride was awkward.
Lois hadn't seen her cousin in five years, and she was starting to remember why that wasn't necessarily a bad thing. Bella had always been something of a moody little twit, but not definitively a bad person. Just a…
"Teenager?" Clark had suggested two days prior when she had mentioned Bella's impending visit. Lois had nodded bleakly.
"That's one way of putting it."
At present, Lois and Bella were driving in silence to the Daily Planet, straight from the airport. "My boss won't care that you're there," She'd told the eighteen year-old, "And I can talk and type at the same time."
Bella was silent. Then, as though she'd just realized that Lois had been expecting a response to that, she said "Oh, yeah. Okay."
"Great."
The rest of the ride was one-hundred and ten percent silent.
When they finally reached the Daily Planet and had ridden the elevator to the bullpen, she felt relieved: She was in her element here. She could handle anything here. When the doors opened and they stepped into the large, densely populated room, she couldn't help but notice that Bella barely regarded it; normally people who'd never been there before looked around with wide-eyed wonder. Bella, however, just glanced around like it was all… Beneath her.
Deep breath, Lois. Deep breath.
With a tight smile and the kind of patience she knew would make just about anybody who knew her proud, Lois led her younger cousin over to her desk. Clark was busy typing away at something, and looked up when they approached. "Welcome back." He stood up and held out his hand. "You must be Bella: It's nice to finally meet you." Bella took his hand somewhat awkwardly and returned the handshake weakly.
"Bella, this is my desk-mate and- Friend-" Clark cocked an eyebrow at that, but said nothing. "-Clark Kent. Clark, this is my cousin Bella Swan."
"Hi." Bella managed.
You emo little-
"So," Lois continued, wringing her hands tightly to resist the suddenly overwhelming urge she had to wrap them around Bella's neck, "I have some work to do. You can, uh, talk- Ask questions. Or not. Whichever works." Bella was there for a week at least, so it wasn't like they were pinched for time.
"Mm-hm." Bella didn't even thank Clark when he brought over a chair for her, and Lois figured that she should go back to work on her article about the meat packers' strike before she said something she regretted.
For a full thirty minutes, there was silence between the two women. Lois kept her eyes fixated on the computer screen. Whenever she was able to slip a subtle glance over to Bella, she saw that her cousin was just staring off into space, looking even more forlorn than she had before.
Lois took a breath and tried to reel in her temper. Okay: Bella was clearly in pain. Lois had learned a long time ago not to fall into a spiraling, endless depression when a boyfriend left her, but Bella was eighteen- She was still learning that lesson. She was still getting over that irritating teenage egocentrism that refused to let her see what this spell of hers was doing to the people who cared about her.
Now, how could Lois go about conveying this to her? Bella had always been odd in the sense that she was stubborn when she didn't need to be, and utterly lenient at times when she really should have been stubborn. She was a walking example of Murphy's Law: Only reacting in the ways most inconvenient to the person who was trying to talk sense to her. There was a fair chance that she would reject whatever Lois said.
Lois mulled over this for a little bit. In the meantime, Clark got up for a "coffee run" (the police scanner on the desk chirped something about an armed robbery taking place a few blocks away). "Would you ladies like anything?"
"Something strong," Lois muttered. "Really strong. Like, alcoholic." If Bella was aware that her behavior was the cause of Lois's sudden craving for an Irish coffee, she gave no sign.
"Bella?"
"No thanks."
He left. Lois went back to typing, and Bella went back to moping. The sad thing about it was that Lois could tell that she was thinking about Edward, primarily because that was exactly what Charlie had told her: "She's been completely zoned-out, blank ever since he left her. I mean, I didn't like the guy, but the way he just dumped her- It's becoming a serious problem, Lo."
"What do you mean the way he dumped her?" Lois had asked.
"They were in the woods, and he just left her there. Left her. And you know what she did?" Lois heard a growl in her normally relaxed uncle's voice and knew it was bad. "She just curled up in a ball on the ground and didn't move. We found her hours later, and Sam Uley had to pick her up and carry her home because she couldn't walk."
Now, Lois had been aware that her cousin had a tendency for melodrama. She'd known that from years ago when Bella threw a moody fit over the fact that people were celebrating her birthday (Because at thirteen, she was apparently becoming an old maid) and telling her how pretty she was in her new dress. If Bella didn't take such issue with the world she might actually not have anything to complain about, and that would just be incomprehensible.
But this- "Near comatose", he'd eventually said. Really? Lois had asked Charlie to describe Bella's actions in almost perfect detail before she would admit that, yeah, that was about as close to comatose as you could get without actually being there. "And when she started to snap out of it the other day, she actually looked surprised when I said that she was moping!"
That part didn't surprise her; Bella generally seemed to have missed out on acquiring empathy. Lois still held out a vague hope that it was just her little teenage brain still in the process of forming, but that hope was growing dimmer and dimmer with every day that passed and Bella remained a self-obsessed twit with no concept that the things she did actually affected and were noticed by others.
Lois suddenly realized that she'd been re-reading the same paragraph onscreen for the last five minutes. Given that work-mode usually gave her laser-focus, she finally conceded that it was time for the Talk.
"So… You know what? I'm not good at this." Lois rotated her chair so that she was facing Bella. "I'm just going to say it: Your dad's worried about you, and from what he's told me, I think I should be too."
Bella sighed, her eyes rolling shut. "Lois, he's already read me the Riot Act, all right? Nothing you can say will change anything."
"How do you know that?" Lois adopted a semi-pleading tone. "Bella, come on. Let it out. I can listen!"
"Why bother telling you? Charlie's probably already told you everything." She was positively pouting at that. Lois's eyes narrowed, and she leaned back.
"Yeah, he told me a few things."
"Like Edward-" Bella actually cringed when she said his name, and had to stop for a second. When she started up again, her voice was shaky. "-Like he was the worst person, and he didn't want me with him, right? He's happy that- that he left."
"Well, let's see: He said you dumped all your friends once you started hanging out with this guy-" Lois ticked off her fingers as she counted. "-Ran away to Arizona, started sneaking him into your room- Yeah, he knew, Bella-" Bella's jaw had dropped. "-Charlie is a police officer, you know. He notices stuff. Now where was I? Right, you fell through a window in Arizona-"
"That was an acc-i-dent." Bella hissed at the skepticism dripping from Lois's tone.
"Sure," The darker haired woman assured with saccharine innocence. "And when Edward left you, he actually physically left you alone in the woods, where you promptly curled into a ball on the ground and were found hours later by a search party."
"Believe it or not, Lois, it hurt." At that point, Clark returned with the coffee (She must have missed the radio chatter regarding the sudden appearance of The Blur). He started to signal his return to Lois, but then quietly slid the paper cup onto her desk and otherwise maintained his distance and silence.
"Oh, I know it hurt, Bella." Lois snapped, rising out of her seat and moving her hands to her hips. "Charlie said that you've more or less been in a waking coma since September. You eat, you sleep- you have crazy-ass nightmares, but you sleep-" Bella's cheeks went red. "-you just barely do your homework, and you ignore everyone and everything else on the planet."
"It was not that bad." Bella fired back.
"Bella, this is insane. This is not healthy. Normal people do not go comatose when their boyfriends leave them!"
"You don't understand." Bella's lip was quivering, but her eyes were narrowed and her tone was cold. "You could never understand. Edward was my entire world, my life, my everything. We had a special connection that not a lot of people get to have, and to lose it is the most painful thing in the world."
Lois snapped.
"Now you listen to me, Little-Miss-Mopey-Pants," She began in a hiss. "I'll chalk that 'nobody will ever know the deepest and darkest depths of my pain because I am just so unique and special' thing up to your natural teenager's personal-fable complex. But believe it or not, you are not the first person whose boyfriend has ever left her. You are not the first person to be upset by it. You have every right to be sad and pained and dejected, because that's perfectly normal. But are you seriously telling me that you lapsed into a waking-coma because Mr. Generic-High-School-Boyfriend whose name you'll barely remember in ten years moved away?"
"He wasn't generic!" Bella protested furiously, chagrin written all over her face. "We had something deep and true, something that could have lasted forever!"
"The key words in that sentence being 'could have'. Look, I'm all for a period of mourning following a break-up, popping out the Ben and Jerry's and watching some sad movies, maybe even defacing a couple of Polaroids and replacing his face with Brad Pitt's, but there is a line between healthy sadness and crazy-ass codependent sadness."
"We were not codependent." Bella growled.
"Okay- By your own admission, he was 'my entire world, my life, my everything'. Which, again, fits pretty well with what your dad told me about how you more or less abandoned everyone you knew at school once dear ol' Eddie came into your life, and then totally ignored them when he broke up with you? I cannot believe that someone who shares DNA with me actually became one of those girls who dumps their friends just because a boy pays them a modicum of attention. It's pathetic."
"Lois!" Tess Mercer was walking over from the staircase, her about-to-throw-down-with-Lois-Lane face on. "I can hear you all the way from the top floor."
"Tess!" Lois called, pointing to her boss without actually turning to look at her. "Boyfriend dumps you and leaves you alone in the woods, unarmed, with bears and wolves and God knows what else in the area, what do you do?"
"File down a stick to a sharp point, hunt him down and make sure he regrets it." Tess said without missing a beat. Then she paused, thought, and then added, "I might also blow up his car."
"And she'd do it, too." Lois said pointedly. "And that's what you should have done."
"He didn't mean for anything to happen to me! He's never hurt me, and Charlie just never understood what we had! He never even gave Edward a chance!"
"Because dumping you in a woods and apparently inducing you into a four-month coma wasn't hurting you!" Lois slammed both hands down on the desk. "I don't give a damn what he intended to do, it only matters what he did! He couldn't even be bothered to give you a ride back home before leaving you, so don't go telling me that he cares! If he cared, he would have driven you back, offered Charlie some sincere apologies for all the snippy little comments he fired at him whenever he came over, and he would have never let you become so damn dependent on him in the first place!"
Bella opened her mouth to speak, but Lois cut her off. "You have been nothing but a pathetic, whiny brat since he left you, Bella, and you're in the process of giving Charlie a damn coronary for worrying over you! I don't care if he held a shotgun up to Edward's head whenever he came over to the house, he is your father, and if he says 'Go out and get some friends' or 'You're going back to Jacksonville with your mom because clearly you can't get better here' then I suggest you get with the damn program and do as he says. And don't tell me that you're eighteen and you can do whatever you want, because you live in his house under his rules, and being treated like an adult means having to ACT LIKE ONE FIRST!"
Bella was utterly silent, eyes wide, taken aback by the rage. Lois knew for a fact that Charlie had never yelled at her like this, and considered telling him that it was an effective method every now and then. At this point most of the bullpen had stopped to get a look at Lois's rage. One look and a little wave from Tess, though, and they all got back to what they were doing. Clark was kind of covering his face, seemingly torn between embarrassment and pity.
"Congratulations," Tess told the young brunette dryly. "You've just been Lois'd."
Bella still looked shell-shocked. It wasn't an uncommon expression for those of faint-heart that had the misfortune of going up against Lois Lane. Clark decided to take pity on her. "Why don't we go get something from the bakery on the corner? My treat." He gently led Bella from the office, leaving Tess and Lois alone.
"Wow." Tess's eyebrows popped up and her lips twisted into a smirk as she regarded Lois. "That was impressive. The relationship version of 'Intervention'?" Lois blew a long breath of air out between her teeth and shut her eyes.
"You have no idea." She sighed. "But she's family, and so if I have to push and prod-"
"-and kick and punch-" Tess interjected, and Lois grimaced.
"-that too, I will make sure she gets over this. Bella's always been the dramatic kind, and she is just such the stereotypical angsty and arrogant teenager that thinks she knows everything…" She bit her lip, counted to five and repeated, "But she's family, so I'm going to do what I can."
Tess nodded and lightly patted Lois's shoulder. "Good luck."
"You should be saying that to her: My next step is finding any pictures she has of this guy and blowtorching them."
-End
First Twispite fic. What did you think? :3
Author: inmh
Fandom(s): New Moon, Smallville
Rating: PG-13/T
Word Count: 3,062
Inspiration: Smallville is just so saturated with badass women who do not take crap from anyone (And yet still retain enough vulnerability to make them relatable), I had to do something with at least one of them kicking Bella’s ass. I’ve already got a massive girl-crush on Tess and have her featured in many an in-progress story, so I figured I should use someone else for this one. AND THUS LOIS WAS CHOSEN FOR THE HOLY TASK. :D
Warnings: Language
Summary: Smallville crossover, set during New Moon. When nothing else worked, Charlie decided to call his niece in order to find a way to snap Bella out of her self-destructive zombie-funk.
Disclaimer: I don't own Smallville. It belongs to Jerry Siegal, Joe Shuster and the CW. Twilight belongs to Stephenie Meyer.
"You're going to Kansas."
Bella stared at Charlie. "What?"
"I said you're going to Kansas. You're going to visit with your cousin Lois." Bella was both relieved and confused; the way Charlie had worded it before, he'd made it sound like he was sending her to live there, like he had when he'd said he was going to send her to Jacksonville. The confusion came in because… It was Kansas. And she hadn't seen her older cousin in five years.
"…Why am I going to Kansas to visit Lois?"
Charlie's eyes narrowed further. "You are going to Kansas," He said, "Because I just got a call from Mrs. Stanley with a very interesting story about what happened when you went out with Jessica the other night."
Bella's eyes rolled shut. God, Jessica was already acting like a bitch for what had happened in Port Angeles, why did Charlie have to jump on her back too? "Dad, that wasn't-"
Charlie cut her off with a raised hand. "I don't want to hear it. I do not want to hear it, Bella. God knows I've tried to help you, God knows I've tried to understand how you're feeling, but it's just not working. Maybe Lois will be able to get through to you. Do me a favor and level with her, all right? She's been through break-ups before. She probably knows what you're going through."
Bella didn't respond as Charlie then told her to pack and left the room, but she was incensed. How could he just assume that Lois knew what this felt like? What Bella and Edward had had was special. Unique. Their love was destined to be: They were meant for each other. She had been the first human whose scent had ever affected Edward so strongly! That had to mean something, even if he was gone.
Lois was loud and strong and proud. Though she was also loving, her overbearing and sometimes over-the-top personality tended to make her a chore to deal with. Bella was not surprised that her cousin had cycled through a number of boyfriends over her lifetime. How could she possibly understand the heartache of losing a soul-mate, someone she was meant to stay with forever?
All the same, this was just a trip and it could have been worse. So Bella begrudgingly pulled out her suitcase and started to pack.
()()
The car ride was awkward.
Lois hadn't seen her cousin in five years, and she was starting to remember why that wasn't necessarily a bad thing. Bella had always been something of a moody little twit, but not definitively a bad person. Just a…
"Teenager?" Clark had suggested two days prior when she had mentioned Bella's impending visit. Lois had nodded bleakly.
"That's one way of putting it."
At present, Lois and Bella were driving in silence to the Daily Planet, straight from the airport. "My boss won't care that you're there," She'd told the eighteen year-old, "And I can talk and type at the same time."
Bella was silent. Then, as though she'd just realized that Lois had been expecting a response to that, she said "Oh, yeah. Okay."
"Great."
The rest of the ride was one-hundred and ten percent silent.
When they finally reached the Daily Planet and had ridden the elevator to the bullpen, she felt relieved: She was in her element here. She could handle anything here. When the doors opened and they stepped into the large, densely populated room, she couldn't help but notice that Bella barely regarded it; normally people who'd never been there before looked around with wide-eyed wonder. Bella, however, just glanced around like it was all… Beneath her.
Deep breath, Lois. Deep breath.
With a tight smile and the kind of patience she knew would make just about anybody who knew her proud, Lois led her younger cousin over to her desk. Clark was busy typing away at something, and looked up when they approached. "Welcome back." He stood up and held out his hand. "You must be Bella: It's nice to finally meet you." Bella took his hand somewhat awkwardly and returned the handshake weakly.
"Bella, this is my desk-mate and- Friend-" Clark cocked an eyebrow at that, but said nothing. "-Clark Kent. Clark, this is my cousin Bella Swan."
"Hi." Bella managed.
You emo little-
"So," Lois continued, wringing her hands tightly to resist the suddenly overwhelming urge she had to wrap them around Bella's neck, "I have some work to do. You can, uh, talk- Ask questions. Or not. Whichever works." Bella was there for a week at least, so it wasn't like they were pinched for time.
"Mm-hm." Bella didn't even thank Clark when he brought over a chair for her, and Lois figured that she should go back to work on her article about the meat packers' strike before she said something she regretted.
For a full thirty minutes, there was silence between the two women. Lois kept her eyes fixated on the computer screen. Whenever she was able to slip a subtle glance over to Bella, she saw that her cousin was just staring off into space, looking even more forlorn than she had before.
Lois took a breath and tried to reel in her temper. Okay: Bella was clearly in pain. Lois had learned a long time ago not to fall into a spiraling, endless depression when a boyfriend left her, but Bella was eighteen- She was still learning that lesson. She was still getting over that irritating teenage egocentrism that refused to let her see what this spell of hers was doing to the people who cared about her.
Now, how could Lois go about conveying this to her? Bella had always been odd in the sense that she was stubborn when she didn't need to be, and utterly lenient at times when she really should have been stubborn. She was a walking example of Murphy's Law: Only reacting in the ways most inconvenient to the person who was trying to talk sense to her. There was a fair chance that she would reject whatever Lois said.
Lois mulled over this for a little bit. In the meantime, Clark got up for a "coffee run" (the police scanner on the desk chirped something about an armed robbery taking place a few blocks away). "Would you ladies like anything?"
"Something strong," Lois muttered. "Really strong. Like, alcoholic." If Bella was aware that her behavior was the cause of Lois's sudden craving for an Irish coffee, she gave no sign.
"Bella?"
"No thanks."
He left. Lois went back to typing, and Bella went back to moping. The sad thing about it was that Lois could tell that she was thinking about Edward, primarily because that was exactly what Charlie had told her: "She's been completely zoned-out, blank ever since he left her. I mean, I didn't like the guy, but the way he just dumped her- It's becoming a serious problem, Lo."
"What do you mean the way he dumped her?" Lois had asked.
"They were in the woods, and he just left her there. Left her. And you know what she did?" Lois heard a growl in her normally relaxed uncle's voice and knew it was bad. "She just curled up in a ball on the ground and didn't move. We found her hours later, and Sam Uley had to pick her up and carry her home because she couldn't walk."
Now, Lois had been aware that her cousin had a tendency for melodrama. She'd known that from years ago when Bella threw a moody fit over the fact that people were celebrating her birthday (Because at thirteen, she was apparently becoming an old maid) and telling her how pretty she was in her new dress. If Bella didn't take such issue with the world she might actually not have anything to complain about, and that would just be incomprehensible.
But this- "Near comatose", he'd eventually said. Really? Lois had asked Charlie to describe Bella's actions in almost perfect detail before she would admit that, yeah, that was about as close to comatose as you could get without actually being there. "And when she started to snap out of it the other day, she actually looked surprised when I said that she was moping!"
That part didn't surprise her; Bella generally seemed to have missed out on acquiring empathy. Lois still held out a vague hope that it was just her little teenage brain still in the process of forming, but that hope was growing dimmer and dimmer with every day that passed and Bella remained a self-obsessed twit with no concept that the things she did actually affected and were noticed by others.
Lois suddenly realized that she'd been re-reading the same paragraph onscreen for the last five minutes. Given that work-mode usually gave her laser-focus, she finally conceded that it was time for the Talk.
"So… You know what? I'm not good at this." Lois rotated her chair so that she was facing Bella. "I'm just going to say it: Your dad's worried about you, and from what he's told me, I think I should be too."
Bella sighed, her eyes rolling shut. "Lois, he's already read me the Riot Act, all right? Nothing you can say will change anything."
"How do you know that?" Lois adopted a semi-pleading tone. "Bella, come on. Let it out. I can listen!"
"Why bother telling you? Charlie's probably already told you everything." She was positively pouting at that. Lois's eyes narrowed, and she leaned back.
"Yeah, he told me a few things."
"Like Edward-" Bella actually cringed when she said his name, and had to stop for a second. When she started up again, her voice was shaky. "-Like he was the worst person, and he didn't want me with him, right? He's happy that- that he left."
"Well, let's see: He said you dumped all your friends once you started hanging out with this guy-" Lois ticked off her fingers as she counted. "-Ran away to Arizona, started sneaking him into your room- Yeah, he knew, Bella-" Bella's jaw had dropped. "-Charlie is a police officer, you know. He notices stuff. Now where was I? Right, you fell through a window in Arizona-"
"That was an acc-i-dent." Bella hissed at the skepticism dripping from Lois's tone.
"Sure," The darker haired woman assured with saccharine innocence. "And when Edward left you, he actually physically left you alone in the woods, where you promptly curled into a ball on the ground and were found hours later by a search party."
"Believe it or not, Lois, it hurt." At that point, Clark returned with the coffee (She must have missed the radio chatter regarding the sudden appearance of The Blur). He started to signal his return to Lois, but then quietly slid the paper cup onto her desk and otherwise maintained his distance and silence.
"Oh, I know it hurt, Bella." Lois snapped, rising out of her seat and moving her hands to her hips. "Charlie said that you've more or less been in a waking coma since September. You eat, you sleep- you have crazy-ass nightmares, but you sleep-" Bella's cheeks went red. "-you just barely do your homework, and you ignore everyone and everything else on the planet."
"It was not that bad." Bella fired back.
"Bella, this is insane. This is not healthy. Normal people do not go comatose when their boyfriends leave them!"
"You don't understand." Bella's lip was quivering, but her eyes were narrowed and her tone was cold. "You could never understand. Edward was my entire world, my life, my everything. We had a special connection that not a lot of people get to have, and to lose it is the most painful thing in the world."
Lois snapped.
"Now you listen to me, Little-Miss-Mopey-Pants," She began in a hiss. "I'll chalk that 'nobody will ever know the deepest and darkest depths of my pain because I am just so unique and special' thing up to your natural teenager's personal-fable complex. But believe it or not, you are not the first person whose boyfriend has ever left her. You are not the first person to be upset by it. You have every right to be sad and pained and dejected, because that's perfectly normal. But are you seriously telling me that you lapsed into a waking-coma because Mr. Generic-High-School-Boyfriend whose name you'll barely remember in ten years moved away?"
"He wasn't generic!" Bella protested furiously, chagrin written all over her face. "We had something deep and true, something that could have lasted forever!"
"The key words in that sentence being 'could have'. Look, I'm all for a period of mourning following a break-up, popping out the Ben and Jerry's and watching some sad movies, maybe even defacing a couple of Polaroids and replacing his face with Brad Pitt's, but there is a line between healthy sadness and crazy-ass codependent sadness."
"We were not codependent." Bella growled.
"Okay- By your own admission, he was 'my entire world, my life, my everything'. Which, again, fits pretty well with what your dad told me about how you more or less abandoned everyone you knew at school once dear ol' Eddie came into your life, and then totally ignored them when he broke up with you? I cannot believe that someone who shares DNA with me actually became one of those girls who dumps their friends just because a boy pays them a modicum of attention. It's pathetic."
"Lois!" Tess Mercer was walking over from the staircase, her about-to-throw-down-with-Lois-Lane face on. "I can hear you all the way from the top floor."
"Tess!" Lois called, pointing to her boss without actually turning to look at her. "Boyfriend dumps you and leaves you alone in the woods, unarmed, with bears and wolves and God knows what else in the area, what do you do?"
"File down a stick to a sharp point, hunt him down and make sure he regrets it." Tess said without missing a beat. Then she paused, thought, and then added, "I might also blow up his car."
"And she'd do it, too." Lois said pointedly. "And that's what you should have done."
"He didn't mean for anything to happen to me! He's never hurt me, and Charlie just never understood what we had! He never even gave Edward a chance!"
"Because dumping you in a woods and apparently inducing you into a four-month coma wasn't hurting you!" Lois slammed both hands down on the desk. "I don't give a damn what he intended to do, it only matters what he did! He couldn't even be bothered to give you a ride back home before leaving you, so don't go telling me that he cares! If he cared, he would have driven you back, offered Charlie some sincere apologies for all the snippy little comments he fired at him whenever he came over, and he would have never let you become so damn dependent on him in the first place!"
Bella opened her mouth to speak, but Lois cut her off. "You have been nothing but a pathetic, whiny brat since he left you, Bella, and you're in the process of giving Charlie a damn coronary for worrying over you! I don't care if he held a shotgun up to Edward's head whenever he came over to the house, he is your father, and if he says 'Go out and get some friends' or 'You're going back to Jacksonville with your mom because clearly you can't get better here' then I suggest you get with the damn program and do as he says. And don't tell me that you're eighteen and you can do whatever you want, because you live in his house under his rules, and being treated like an adult means having to ACT LIKE ONE FIRST!"
Bella was utterly silent, eyes wide, taken aback by the rage. Lois knew for a fact that Charlie had never yelled at her like this, and considered telling him that it was an effective method every now and then. At this point most of the bullpen had stopped to get a look at Lois's rage. One look and a little wave from Tess, though, and they all got back to what they were doing. Clark was kind of covering his face, seemingly torn between embarrassment and pity.
"Congratulations," Tess told the young brunette dryly. "You've just been Lois'd."
Bella still looked shell-shocked. It wasn't an uncommon expression for those of faint-heart that had the misfortune of going up against Lois Lane. Clark decided to take pity on her. "Why don't we go get something from the bakery on the corner? My treat." He gently led Bella from the office, leaving Tess and Lois alone.
"Wow." Tess's eyebrows popped up and her lips twisted into a smirk as she regarded Lois. "That was impressive. The relationship version of 'Intervention'?" Lois blew a long breath of air out between her teeth and shut her eyes.
"You have no idea." She sighed. "But she's family, and so if I have to push and prod-"
"-and kick and punch-" Tess interjected, and Lois grimaced.
"-that too, I will make sure she gets over this. Bella's always been the dramatic kind, and she is just such the stereotypical angsty and arrogant teenager that thinks she knows everything…" She bit her lip, counted to five and repeated, "But she's family, so I'm going to do what I can."
Tess nodded and lightly patted Lois's shoulder. "Good luck."
"You should be saying that to her: My next step is finding any pictures she has of this guy and blowtorching them."
-End
First Twispite fic. What did you think? :3