(The following is a nonprofit work of fanfiction and is outside of the original canon. All names, characters, businesses, places, events, and/or incidents of any kind depicted within this story are being used for entertainment purposes only.)

(The Loud House and all related characters were created by Chris Savino and all rights belong to Nickelodeon.)


"Life moves pretty fast. If you don't stop and look around once in a while, you could miss it." – Ferris Bueller's Day Off.


- Chapter One -

A Nostalgic Yearning

Royal Woods, Michigan. January 21st, 2017.

1216 Franklin Avenue, The Loud House...

Lincoln Loud sat down in the center of the living room couch, one leg crossed over the other, his spine relaxing against the cushioned back pillows. He stared blankly at the sixty-inch flat screen television set in front of him, all the while flipping through each channel with the state-of-the-art remote in his hand. This high-quality piece of technology had more than four hundred stations, and yet there was not a single decent program on today.

He glanced down at his wristwatch. It was almost half past five in the evening.

He exhaled deeply from boredom before massaging his brows. Suppose he could catch a quick look at the news, but then he immediately dismissed that idea from his thoughts altogether. The last thing he wanted to hear right now were one-sided narratives and watch old and tired politicians going back and forth over small things that were not even worth going crazy over. It was all just so exhausting, both mentally and emotionally.

Brand new year, same old nonsense, he thought to himself. Lincoln was never one for politics. As far back as he was old enough to remember, he barely paid attention to that kind of stuff. And whatever political viewpoint he did have now as an adult, he would try to keep it mostly to himself, and very seldom did he openly express those opinions, except for maybe an occasion or two when the given situation called for it—which was very rare.

In fact, the closest experience Lincoln has ever had with politics was when at one point, he ran for class president back at his old Middle School. To keep a long story short, the entire ordeal did not go well for him. He smiled after thinking about that one of the many notable memories of his early youth. Hard to believe that was only thirty years ago. And then it suddenly began to dawn on him. His shoulders loosened up and he pressed his back further against the couch.

Thirty years... Wow...! He could not believe just how long it had been since those days. Practically felt like it was only yesterday when he was just a young boy. And now look at him, just a few months away from turning forty-two and he was still living in his childhood househis own house now, by the waywith a beautiful wife and two adorable kids, twins to be precise. And he was now the new owner of his father's family restaurant, Lynn's Table.

He recalled looking in the mirror one afternoon and gazing deeply at his own reflection. He was now roughly the same height as his dad, and he possessed a slim-looking physique—which was funny given that he never worked out his entire life. It was a straight up miracle that he still had all of his snow-white hair on his head at this point in time. What was really extraordinary to him, and to the rest of the family, was how young-looking he seemed to be as well.

Despite now being forty-one years of age, he still appeared like he was somewhere close to his mid-thirties, even though there were a couple of small wrinkles found here and there on his face. Who knew he and his family were blessed with really good genetics? Lincoln was then brought back to the present when he noticed from the left-side corner of his eyes a small unopened bag of nacho cheese Doritos sitting on the lamp table next to the couch.

Huh..., I wonder who left that there? His mouth salivated a little, and he shrugged his shoulders.

"Eh, why not?" he muttered aloud.

He reached his hand over to the side and grabbed the bag from the lamp table. He tried to gently pull open the bag from the sides, but he found both to his confusion and surprise that the bag did not open so easily. What in the world...? He put a little more strength into it. Again, nothing. Lincoln furrowed his brows. What the heck was wrong with this thing? He tried to pull the bag open, this time with all his might, but the bag just would not open.

Lincoln stared intensely at it, his eyes bulging annoyedly.

"So, that's how you want to play, huh?" he grunted. And before he knew it, he went from sitting boredly on the couch scrolling through the television to falling down on the floor in a wrestling match with a bag of Doritos within a matter of seconds. He tried using his teeth to savagely tear it open. No budge. He pressed his foot down on one side of the bag against the coffee table and tried to rip the other side off. Nothing.

For two straight minutes, he tried every method he could think of off the top of his head to open that one stupid bag of chips, and what results did he get out of them? Nothing but failure. In the end, Lincoln panted tiredly as he stared testily at the bag in his hands before finally giving up, tossing it down flat on the coffee table in front of him. He collapsed back onto the couch, his body now spent, and his two minutes of time wasted.

"Wasn't that hungry to begin with anyway," he snorted irritably, folding his arms across his chest. Before he could get the chance to pick up the remote, he became alert when he heard a loud thump that came from upstairs. It sounded almost like a medium-sized crate had fallen to the floor. And then some yelling was thrown in for good measure. Lincoln sighed under his breath as he gently massaged the bridge of his nose.

And just when things were becoming nice and quiet around here. He smirked with a small snort. Then again, that's kind of what happens when your family's last name is Loud. He got up from the couch to his feet and marched up the stairway until he was now in the upstairs hallway. Using his ears, he deduced that the noise was coming from the halfway open door at the far end of the right side of the hall, which led straight into... his childhood bedroom.

And here we go...

"Let go of me, Leia!" a young boy yelled, his voice sounding like it was just moments away from crying.

"Not until you actually fight back, Luke! You little snowflake!" responded a girl's voice quite roughly. As quick as a bolt of lightning, Lincoln darted through the hallway towards the door and opened it inward as wide as he could make it and then launched himself inside.

"What is going on in here?!" he exclaimed before catching a very not-so-pleasing sight displayed right in front of him; a twelve-year-old girl, with long white hair tied into a low ponytail, was pinning a young boy to the carpeted floor.

The boy appeared to be the same height and age as the girl and he too had white hair, but it was much shorter up to the neck. The girl had the boy's right arm pinned firmly behind his scrawny back. She looked up at Lincoln with a startled look, as if he caught her red-handed stealing a leftover sandwich from the refrigerator in the middle of the night. Lincoln's blood began to boil in his veins.

"Leia Organa Loud!" he barked. "You let go of your brother right this second!"

"B-But Dad!" Leia exempted, putting her hands up defensively. "It's not what it looks like!" But whatever excuse she had; Lincoln was not in the mood to listen.

"I said NOW!" he commanded firmly, keeping his hard gaze trained on his daughter. Finally, the little girl's shoulders slumped in defeat, and she stood up from her twin brother. The boy scrambled closely to his father's side and hugged the grown man tightly around his waist. As he held his son closely, Lincoln still kept his eyes firmly locked on his daughter.

"Now, until I get to the bottom of this," he said, pointing a finger towards the opened door, "you march your little behind to your room!"

"B-But Dad, I was just" Lincoln raised his hand up to silence her.

"Not… One… Word… Leia!" Lincoln sternly spoke. "I will come over and listen to your version when I'm finished here! Now march, young lady!" Realizing that anything she was trying to say was now futile, Leia Loud bowed her head low and she quietly walked out of her twin brother's bedroom without another word. Once after she was gone, Lincoln peered down at the sobbing boy.

"You okay, Luke?" the Loud father asked in a now calm voice, tenderly caressing his boy's white hair. Luke Loud gazed up at his father, fresh tears running down his face, and he nodded his head. "She didn't hurt you too badly, did she?"

"N-No...," the boy moaned, wiping a tear or two from his eyes. "N-Not really." Lincoln smiled.

"Good to know," he said, patting his son's head. "Here, bud. Why don't we have a seat on the bed?" Both father and son walked over to Luke's bed, which was located on the right side of the room next to his computer desk and laptop. Lincoln sat on one side of the bed next to his twelve-year-old son and he wrapped his arm across his shoulder.

"Now, could you explain to me what was going on?" the father asked. "Why were the two of you fighting?" After having calmed further down, Luke started twiddling with his fingers as he tried to think of the first thing to say.

"Well...," he began timidly. "We were not exactly fighting. I was just here in my room minding my own business when Leia suddenly came bursting inside. She looked at me with a very upset look on her face. She told me that she heard about what happened the other day at school and so she went on saying she was tired of me being a scared little snowflake, making our family's image look bad."

"So, what exactly did happen the other day, son?" Lincoln asked curiously. Again, Luke tried to pick his next words very carefully.

"There is this girl in some of my classes," he began his story. "This entire week, she's done nothing but give me a hard time; shoving me inside my own locker, splattering a mud pie in my face, you name it. It's just... It's just really frustrating that she keeps doing this to me. But the thing is, I don't know what else to do about it."

"Does this girl have a name?" Lincoln asked curiously. Luke inclined his head into several nods.

"Yeah," he confirmed meekly. "Her name's Charlotte McCann." Right upon hearing that last part of his son's sentence, Lincoln's eyes swelled in surprise. Did he hear that correctly? Did Luke just say the name of what he actually thought he said? No way... It could not be... McCann... Now there was a name Lincoln had not heard in quite a long time now. A name that once belonged to a certain somebody he knew back in Royal Woods Elementary.

A certain somebody who used to be an old but not-so-well-liked arch-rival of his. Chandler... It can't be a coincidence... Just can't...

Lincoln found himself being transported back to memory lane and he mentally cringed when he remembered a few of the nonsense and similar pranks Chandler McCann used to pull on him when the two of them were kids. Chandler was quite a character of a boy back then. In those days, he was once regarded as one of the few popular kids in their elementary school. How a conceiting freeloader like him could even be considered popular, Lincoln would never know.

Apart from that, Chandler was also quite a bully and an annoying prankster, most of those two things aimed at Lincoln as well as some of his other friends. Well, mostly Lincoln. But then, that all changed when in the summer of 1993, Chandler and his family packed up all of their belongings and moved away to Great Lakes City for some reason. Much to Lincoln's greatest relief, he never saw nor heard a single peep from that redheaded jerk again since then.

Back in the present, a curious thought came to the Loud father's mind. Did Chandler actually move back to Royal Woods? If so, then when exactly? And also, just how in the world did he find the time to have a kid of his own? Lincoln then started to wonder just who the unlucky lady was that Chandler roped into being his unwilling bride. Whoever she is, she has my deepest sympathies.

Based on everything Luke just told him, this Charlotte girl seemed to have taken quite a few of these bullying traits from her old man. Guess the apple really did not fall that far away from the tree after all, that is assuming she actually was related to who Lincoln thought she was.

"Have you thought about maybe asking a teacher or the principal for help?" Lincoln inquired.

"You think I haven't tried already?" Luke told his father. "They barely do anything. They say they'll look into it, when really they just sit behind their desks sucking on orange wedges and drinking bad coffee." Lincoln's brows furrowed.

"Okay..., have you actually... you know... tried to stand up to this girl?" Luke's face almost became pale as his beloved Aunt Lucy's when he heard what his father just said to him.

"Are you kidding, Dad?" he nearly exclaimed. "Charlotte would skin me alive if I did! There is no way that I could! And besides, she's kind of stronger than me!" Luke looked away from his father and bowed his head low.

"I'm sorry, Dad. I just don't know how I can deal with that." Lincoln continued to gaze down at his son, providing him with a sympathetic look.

"So anyway," Luke continued. "Leia somehow learned about it. I don't know how, but she did. If I had to guess, I would say she heard it from one of her friends or something. She came bursting into my bedroom—without even knocking by the way— and she said everything I mentioned earlier. So, she said that she was going to whip me into fighting shape. And... well, you pretty much saw what came next."

Thinking about that moment, Lincoln's mind wandered back to thirty years ago, when his sports fanatic for a sister, Lynn, had done almost the exact same thing to him, in terms of trying to teach him how to fight back against bullies. His sister may have imagined herself like The Karate Kid sometime after another, but knowing Lynn's personality, she would have made an excellent candidate for Cobra Kai instead. Boy, how things have changed since then.

Okay, maybe not all of it. Back in the present day, Lincoln caressed his son's white hair again.

"I know where you're coming from, son...," he said, as it became his turn to choose his own words carefully. "And please, don't take this the wrong way, I'm not excusing what your sister just did, but you have to understand that, in some ways, she kind of has a pointabout one thing anyway; you can't let yourself to be afraid and picked on forever." Luke looked up at his old man with a stunned expression.

"But Dad, I" Lincoln gently raised his index finger up to make his son be quiet for a moment.

"And one of these days," Lincoln continued, "you'll have to learn how to be brave and stand up for yourselfand I don't mean by getting into a fight. That's the last thing I want you to do. What I'm trying to say is that you need to stand firm and hold your ground, no matter the odds. It's okay to feel a little scared as times, son. But you cannot let that fear dictate every aspect of your life. You know what I'm saying?" The son looked up at his father and lightly nodded his head.

"A wise man once said; It's okay to lose to an opponent"

"but one must not lose to fear," Luke finished reciting, a small smile taking form on his face. "Sure thing, Mr. Miyagi."

"That's my boy," Lincoln said before embracing his son into a gentle hug and then releasing him. "I'm going to go have a word with your sister now, okay?" With that, he got up from the edge of the bed and headed out of the bedroom. Before shutting it closed, Lincoln turned back around to face his son.

"And don't forget what I told you, alright?" he said. "And remember that our family will always have your back."

Luke nodded again at his dad, feeling quite better now from their little talk. And so, Lincoln calmly shut the door behind him. Now that that was over, his smile turned into a serious frown as he marched on over towards his daughter's bedroom across the hallway. When he reached the door that stood between two others—the door that led into what used to be his sisters' Lynn and Lucy's childhood bedroom—he knocked three times against the wooden frame.

"Leia!" he called out in a gentle yet firm tone. "I'm coming in."

After straightening his orange button-up shirt and taking a deep breath, Lincoln slowly but surely opened the door to see his daughter sitting on her bed, fearfully awaiting what her fate could be. Her feet dangled from the edge, as she solemnly ate from a recently opened yet very familiar bag of nacho cheese Doritos. Lincoln blinked a couple of times and gaped for a few seconds at the object in her hands. I swear, some supernatural force is at work against me.

Getting back on track, Lincoln sauntered inside, and he grabbed the computer chair from Leia's desk opposite from her bed and he sat in it right in front of his daughter. He gently took the opened Doritos bag from her hands and placed it on her nightstand. Rather timidly, Leia looked up at her old man, who gazed down at her with an unamused countenance on his face, his arms now folded across his chest. His four fingers drummed almost impatiently against his right bicep.

"Would you care to explain to me what you thought you were doing with your brother?" Lincoln asked in a stern-sounding voice. "He's already told me his version of the story, now I want to hear yours! So, start talking!"

"Dad, please, it's not what you think!" Leia tried to explain. "I swear, I wasn't trying to hurt him!"

"Well, it pretty much looked like it from where I was standing," Lincoln countered. "If that's not the case, then what were you trying to do exactly?" The young Loud girl rubbed her arm almost timidly.

"I was just helping him, Dad!" she told her father. Lincoln raised an eyebrow.

"Helping him?" he questioned. "You call pinning him to the floor 'helping' him? You call twisting his arm behind his back so that he couldn't move and defend himself 'helping' him?"

"I was only trying to toughen him up a bit!" Leia nearly exclaimed innocently, her bottom lip starting to quiver. "I just wanted what was best for my brother, that's all! You have to understand, he has this problem at school! There's this bully who keeps picking on him! Did he tell you about that?"

"Yes, he did." Lincoln answered, along with a confirming nod.

"I heard about it from my friends, and it made me upset!" Leia went on. "I couldn't just stand idly by while that McCann girl walks all over him like some kind of helpless bug! So, I did what any good sibling would do and tried to help him!"

"By behaving just like a bully, yourself?" Lincoln asked, his hands resting on his hips. Leia speedily shook her head.

"Daddy, please!" she cried. "Please, believe me! I love my brother, and I just want to help him!"

Leia could not contain it any longer and she bowed her head low, fresh tears bursting from her eyes and streaming down her face. After a moment of silence, Lincoln's stern expression relaxed. He sighed under his breath, and he mildly shook his head. Decidedly, he stood up from the computer chair and sat down on the bed next to his daughter. He gently craned his arm around her small shoulders, pulling her closely to him until her head rested against his side.

"Shh... There, there," Lincoln spoke softly. "Of course, I believe you, princess. And I do understand what you were only trying to do." Leia looked her father in the eyes, a little bit taken aback to hear that from him.

"R-Really...?" she asked with a slight hitch in her voice. Lincoln nodded.

"Yes, really," he confirmed. "But it still didn't make it okay for you to do what you did. Hurting your own brother like that will not help solve his bully problem with this McCann girl. He's already got enough of that with her at school, and he certainly doesn't need another one put on his plate—least from his own sister." Leia sighed almost defeatedly before wiping off more tears from her reddened face.

"I'm sorry, Daddy," she muttered. "But still, I just cannot stand the idea of him being a little snowflake and letting others trample all over him."

"And I agree with you, princess," Lincoln concurred. Well, only half of it anyway. "But I really don't think calling him names and roughing him up like that was the option to go for. There are much better ways to help him grow and be brave, you know. And also, did you really have to go that far to say that he was making our family look bad?" Leia thought of it for a moment, after wiping another tear from her face.

"Okay, y-yeah, that may have sounded harsher than I thought, now that I think about it,"

"Oh, it sounded more than just a 'bit harsher', Leia," Lincoln explained. "It sounded very demeaning. You made him feel like he was inadequate, like the only thing he was good for was embarrassing our family. That's the last thing I want him to feel like. What you have to understand, princess, is that words are just as powerful as sticks and stones. He needs our emotional support just as much as he needs the physical."

After wiping another tear from her face, Leia glanced back up at her father, her eyes glistening from the bedroom light.

"You're right, Daddy," she muttered guiltily. "I'm sorry. I'm really, really, sorry."

"Don't tell me you're sorry," Lincoln said. "You should be telling that to Luke. He needs his sister, not another bully." Leia looked away and she hung her head low again, now feeling very ashamed of herself.

"I guess I should be grounded, huh?" she asked. Lincoln thought about it for a short moment. Finally, he made his answer vocal as he smiled at his little girl.

"Nah. I think I'm going to let you off the hook just this once," he concluded. Leia smiled, and she embraced Lincoln into a tight hug around his chest. Lincoln wrapped his arms around her and kissed her on the forehead. After separating from their embrace, his smile transformed back into that same serious frown from before.

"But if I so much as catch you doing something like this again," he said sternly and clearly, "I guarantee, you will not be seeing your phone, your laptop, or our Nintendo for the next two weeks. And you will forget about going to your cousin Laura's birthday party this next weekend. Do I make myself clear, young lady?" Leia nodded her white head obediently.

"As crystal, sir," she responded. "I promise, I will be better next time."

"That's my girl." Lincoln said, before standing back up and then kissing her on the forehead a second time. Right before heading out the door, Lincoln turned around to face her one more time. "Your mother should be home in less than half an hour. We're going to have some pizza from Domino's for dinner tonight. Does that sound good?" Leia beamed brightly at her father, and she nodded excitedly. Lincoln snorted and nodded himself.

"Alrighty then, but just remember what I said, okay? Luke needs his sister, not another bully." With that, Lincoln closed the bedroom door behind him as he returned outside to the hallway. In that very moment, his shoulders instantly relaxed, and he leaned his back against Leia's bedroom door. He exhaled deeply in both tiredness and relief, before climbing down the stairs to the living room and lazily plopping himself back on the couch. He massaged the bridge of his nose.

Sheesh, Dad, he thought exhaustedly. And here I thought raising two kids would have been easy enough. If his father, Lynn Loud Sr., was in this room with him right now, at this very moment, sitting on his favorite recliner chair closely next to his son, that man would most likely say to him with a chuckle and an added smile on his face, "Hey, at least you won't have to go through the trials and tribulations of having to raise eleven kids, like your mother and I."

Oh yeah? Well, being a parent of twins seem to have its own fair share of trials and tribulations.

In that moment, these thoughts prompted Lincoln to slowly gaze around the living room, observing every object, every piece of anything that was directly within his line of sight. The color of the living room rug, the old family photos that hung neatly on the walls above and around the fireplace or on the counter tops and shelves. A small grew around Lincoln's face and almost every childhood memory instantly flashed through his mind.

This house... So many memories, he recalled, sighing fondly. A lot of those memories were quite good, which thankfully outweighed a small number of the bad. He recollected when these walls were at one point painted a vibrant shade of blue and pink, not like the boring and uninspired hue of beige like it was now. Standing peacefully on one shelf closely next to the fireplace was a framed photograph which surprisingly stood the tests of time itself.

Upon a much closer look, it was a picture of Lincoln himself, when he was just eleven years old, holding his baby sister Lily in his arms, her smiling chubby-cheeked face covered in applesauce. Hard to believe that she was only fifteen months old when that photo was taken. Now, she was almost thirty-two, and had become one of the most talented and influential painters here in Royal Woods. Lincoln let out a small chortle before sighing blissfully again at the old memories.

He and his ten sisters surely came a long way since they were kids back in the 1980's. And now, all of them were living out their long-desired dreams and aspirations, despite some of the ups and downs that came along with them. And despite some of the madness that their family went through back then, there were still a few times where Lincoln wished he could travel back into the past and re-live the days of his innocent and ignorant youth again.

Where is Dr. Emmett Brown and his time-traveling DeLorean when you need them? There were a number of times when Luke and Leia heard him talk about the 1980's with such fondness and longing, and the two of them would find themselves strongly curious about it.

"Dad, what was it like back when you were a kid?" Luke asked him at one point before, a question Lincoln thought his son would never ask him. A question that almost brought a joyful tear in his eye. He recalled going on and on about a lot of the things he remembered experiencing while growing up in that one golden era that made up most of his childhood.

The way Lincoln described it to them, the trends of that era, the style of clothes he and his sisters and other people wore, the music they endlessly listened to, the technology that was available back then, the whole ding dang lot of it. The twins would find themselves very much enthralled by what their father said to them. It was like he was telling a story that came straight from of the pages of an old science fantasy story.

But even though there were a lot of upsides, Lincoln would be lying if he did not acknowledgeI certainly do now at leastthat the 1980's had quite a few of its fair share of the downsides as well. But Lincoln paid none of that stuff any attention, because he was mostly too preoccupied with being a normal kid and living his life to the fullest possible like any other young boy his age at the time. Lincoln snorted through his nose.

If you can even call living under one roof in a family of thirteen people "normal".

While the United States was too busy butting heads with the Soviet Union, he was up in his bedroom reading his favorite comic books, wearing nothing but his socks and underwear. As America was going through a major downturn not seen since the Great Depression, he and a few of his sisters were playing Duck Hunt and Super Mario Bros. on the Nintendo Entertainment System. That or playing old school Dungeons & Dragons with Clyde and their other friends.

When the Satanic Panic took the country by storm, Lincoln was playing over at Tall Timbers Park, pretending he was on the Forest Moon of Endor from Star Wars. That alone pretty much explained where his son's and daughter's names came from. When the AIDS epidemic came about, he was either listening to Huey Lewis on his Sony Walkman or sitting right here in the living room watching Saturday morning cartoons while eating a giant bowl of his favorite breakfast cereal.

And yet despite hearing a number of the negatives that came with the positives, Luke and Leia did not find themselves deterred by them, still feeling quite enthralled with their father's many stories of his and their aunts' childhoods, despite what was happening across the world during that time.

"Wow, the 80's were quite something, weren't they, Dad?" he recalled Leia asking him.

Sweetheart, you have no idea. Lincoln thought as he sighed blissfully at the old memories. And so, he carefully leaned his back against the couch, and folded his resting hands on his chest. With a strong sense of nostalgic yearning, he allowed his mind to be transported back down through memory lane, rewinding the mental video tape within the recesses of his mind all the way back thirty years ago to the beginning.

Back to the old days of wildly large hair, neon spandex, shoulder pads, and totally radical music.

Back to the glorious time most famously known throughout the modern world as the 1980's...