"What is grief, if not love persevering?" -Vision (WandaVision)

Humphrey: Is this quote supposed to mean something?

Garth: Uh no shit, Blitz just finds these quotes for CBT.

Kate: What?

Blazin' Blitz: What?

Lilly: Lol, what?

Kate: O... kay? Garth's into CBT. Noted.

Blazin' Blitz: Why the hell was I mentioned in that cursed sentence?

Garth: Mother... fuck! I was just- FUCK! That's not what I meant!

Lilly: It's okay, we all got a kink or two.

Blazin' Blitz: What? You're the last person in the friggin' MULTIVERSE I thought I'd hear that from.

Lilly: (shrugs)

Garth: OOOOOOOOHHHHHHHHH!!!!!

Humphrey: OOOOOOOOOOHHHHHHHH!!!!

Sweet Dreams

Somehow in the late 1960's...

(This chapter can be skipped since it really has no meaning to the story (maybe just a bit). It's a nightmare scene that I added as a meme/reference/easter egg thing)

Lilly's P.O.V.

"Oh goodness, what a horrible dream!" I yell as I shoot up from the bed. I look around and find that I was not in the the same room as I was before. "Strange..." I say, somehow creating an uproar of laughter from... somewhere. There was no one else in this room besides me, how was there so much laughter sounding so close to me?

I walk to the door but before I could do so, I notice my sleeves were different. I was sure that I was wearing a hoodie before. It looked like I was wearing some sort of vintage yellow and white spotted swing dress. "This is a dazzling outfit, I must say." My mouth spits out words I'd never say. The invisible crowd from before begins to whistle and clap their hands. "Hm..."

I proceed to open the door then see my surrogate father walking down the stairs across the passage. I try and run but the heels I'm wearing for some reason made that difficult. What the hell is going on?

I speed walk down the stairs, carefully trying not to mimic the mistake someone I know did recently. My memory was fuzzy, I couldn't think of who it was. "Good morning little sister!" I hear Kate's voice. She sounded so happy... so scripted. I felt a sharp pain in my chest as I turned around to face her. Something was very wrong.

"Hey sister, is everything copacetic?" I felt like cutting out my tongue after these words escaped my mouth. I have no control over what I say here but I can control what I do... mostly. "Right on. Did you get word that Belle and Jacob are coming over?" She says. Now I felt an even sharper pain in both my head and chest now. "You're bluffing."

"Word from the bird, Lillian." Kate states before comically pointing at the birds nest outside. The crowd of ghosts nuke themselves in laughter once more. This was driving me insane. I didn't notice it at first but I did consider it. There's no doubt about it now: this was definitely a second dream. A sitcom of some kind.

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Humphrey: Hahaha, what the fuck? Lilly was so depressed, she woke up in WandaVision?

Kate: Short answer, yes.

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"Wonderful, your boyfriend's parents are coming to the pad." I'm guessing that I meant Garth's parents were coming over. But... my parents names were Jacob and Bell. "What the (BLEEP)?!" I manage to yell. Kate's smile turns straight as soon as I cursed. The invisible sitcom audience boo's at me. "We don't use that language around here..." She says whilst she glares at me as if I was some kind of repulsive creature. She then pulls out a gun from her amber dress somehow.

I start running away from her, even though I know it's just a dream. The shortcut or 'speedrun meta' to end the dream would be to let her shoot me or die in some way. Fuck it. I hate guns being pointed at me so I keep running. I jump down the stairs then see Eve and Tony burning alive in the kitchen. "Hey darling, don't mind the eggs, they're a little burnt." Eve says as she offers me a burning plate of an egg and bacon breakfast.

I scream in shock as I turn myself around and run for the front door. It appears to open itself but in actual fact, there was someone behind the door. It's Humphrey standing between my biological parents, Belle and Jacob.

"Hey Lillian, is Kate with you? I'd like to show her my broken heart." Humphrey says, holding out pieces of what looked like a shattered sculpture of a life-size heart in his palms. That cursed scene will now forever be burned into my eyes. Kate, still chasing me, fires the weapon. The bullets miss both me and Humphrey but hit my birth parents. Everything around me slowed as my parents fell to the floor. "You've gotta wake up sooner or later." Humphrey tells me in my dreamscape.

Even though this was a dream, I knew I still lost both by foster and biological parents in the real world. The world around me begins to shatter and collapse around me. Kate, with a soft smile and a tear running down her face, aims the gun at me.

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(END OF SCENE)

"What a fucked up nightmare..." I say quietly just as my eyes shoot open from the psychological hell my own mind put me through. I actually blame myself for breaking too easily at things like this. I let out a sigh before resting my head in my palms. I must've been crying in my sleep since the fur on my hands became damp once they touched my cheeks.

I quickly wipe my tears after hearing Humphrey quietly opening the door. He sees me sitting upright on the bed as he enters the room. "Can't rest easy too?" I ask him without looking directly at him.

"Yeah, I can't help but worry about you and your sister right now." He replies as he sits on the foot of the bed. "I'm worrying about Kate too..." I whisper, recalling the weird nightmare I just had. "Hey, don't take this in a weird way y'know but... can I sleep with you? Just for tonight?" I ask him. I feel that Kate and I have been asking way too many favors from Humphrey recently and he's accepted each and every one of them almost without question. I'd be totally okay with it if he said no to this one request. "Sure, I'll sleep on the fl-" I cut him off before he completes the word. "No, I'll sleep on the floor. You've been so hospitable tonight and dedicated enough to get every bit of my work on time earlier today. Quit being the good guy for once, will you?"

Humphrey simply shrugs his shoulders. "It's not like anything good comes out of being the bad guy, y'know." He says. "Oh, and I got you to smirk. That's gotta count towards an achievement."

"Tsk, you almost made me forget about tonight... almost." I start to whimper. "I'm sorry-" He apologizes. "No, no... this is good- awesome actually. You can really distract wolves from all kinds of worries and stress around them." I say as I smile, wiping the tears off my face. "Not sure if that's a compliment..." Humphrey says as he narrows his eyes at me."Just allow it." I tell Humphrey with a small laugh in which he chuckles at. This was the first time I laughed at all since Kate and I got home. "You're a damn magician, I hate it."

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Humphrey's P.O.V.

Well, I'm not sure if I'm doing what Kate requested me to do the way I was supposed to. I was asked to lighten Lilly up a bit and show her she wasn't alone in this not make her so have fun to the point that she'd forget that her parents died tonight. Maybe I should've let her be.

I bite my lip as I take Lilly to my room, trying not think about this too much. I open the door and enter room, followed by Lilly. "You sure were quick to run into your own room first. Trying to hide something?" She asks me. "Of course not and if I did, I would've hidden the thing under the bed or shoved it in a cupboard or something." I reply with full confidence.

My bed was already made so I ask Lilly to settle in while I look for my sleeping bag I use for camping. She reluctantly gets in the bed as I start searching my wardrobe. "Just hop in bed with me." Lilly says behind me. I turn around but I don't respond right a way. "Look we're close friends and all but we're not 'that close'." I say, deliberately trying to avoid the situation by making it what it wasn't.

"You know that's not what I'm saying at all. It's a cold night and I'm not gonna let you sleep on the floor in your own house." She says with a chill in her words. "You can be scarier than Kate if you really wanted to..."I tell her. Lilly shifts to the edge of the bed so I have room to get in with her. Yeah, this won't be a comfortable night. I flip the second light switch next to the bed before Lilly and I say goodnight to eachother with our backs almost touching.

As you could imagine, neither of us could a decent amount of sleep since we had our backs just an inch apart from eachother. I can't deny that whatever perfume Lilly used smelled good, though it didn't help me rest any easier...

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2 Hours Later

I lay on my side while staring at the PC monitor at the end of the room. Since I couldn't sleep, I think of all my best memories with Kate's parents. The room was so quiet we could here distant ambulances and firetruck sirens.

"Can't sleep either?" Lilly asks. "Mm." I hum in response. The sirens now made it completely impossible for me to close my eyes since I kept thinking of Tony and Evelyn. "What was your best time with them?" Lilly asks me without showing any emotion in the question. She was closing herself off again but this time she was doing it for my sake.

"Pretty much more than half the time I spent with them was really memorable. Tony scared me quite a bit but not nearly as much as Eve did if I managed to irritate her in some way. Remember that time we all went for a camping trip when you were still dating-" I stop myself from talking any further when I heard Lilly sniffling behind me. I try to turn around but she stops me with a thumbs up gesture, showing me that she was okay. "Keep going, maybe a good story will get me to sleep." Lilly adds some humour to the night. Her change of tone was sudden but I wasn't complaining. It was good hearing her voice sounding lighter again.

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A/N: Well that's the end of the chapter (luckily). Thanks again for giving it a read and see you in the next one. Stay safe and keep well.

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The Lounge: ÆLIHS

Humphrey: Huh... WandaVision all over again in that chapter.

Garth: That's an exaggeration. Not every sitcom nightmare thing is a direct reference to WandaVision. Lilly's scene was inspired from a game I forgot the name to.

Lilly: "We dont use that language around here..." that was kind of on the nose for Saints Row fans to pick up.

Garth: Right! Saints Row IV.

Humphrey: SR... now that's a fuck I haven't given in a long time.

Lilly: You don't understand the meme absurdity if you say that about a Saints Row game, GTA fanboy...

Humphrey: And I took that personally motherfucker...

Blazin' Blitz: "Meme absurdity", kinda like the plot of this fic (as you'll see in the next four or five chapters after this one. The Suspicious Suits chapters is where the story really starts getting crazy)

Humphrey: We don't know this new plot since you scrapped the original TMELIHS idea, which was okay btw...

Kate: Lilly didn't have much of a nightmare scene in TMELIHS and she didn't interact with Humphrey as much as she did in AELIHS.

Garth: ÆLIHS.

Humphrey: ÆLIHS.

Lilly: Wow.

Blazin' Blitz: ÆLIHS.

Kate: What the hell? You too?

Blazin' Blitz: It looks so satisfying to type it like that.

Lilly: Boys...

Garth: Girls...

Humphrey: Oh boy...

(Civil War theme plays)

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To Be Continued...

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"-then you all had to pull me out from the mud. Eve was so pissed at me that day." I end the story. "She was still relieved when we pulled you out though. Mom never stopped talking about how worried she was for you." Lilly says to me with a warming smile. "Wow, you're talking like I'm your brother right now."

"Aren't you though? I mean we've known eachother for how many years now, nine, ten years?" Lilly asks rhetorically. "Sure but I haven't lived under the same roof as you for ten years." I replied anyway. She scoffs and turns around to poke me in the ribs with her elbow. "Ow, why?"

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