"Guess what we've got!" sang out Daisy's cheerful voice as she burst into the Lighthouse common room/kitchen area.
But before FitzSimmons could do anything more than look up at their beaming wife and her bouncing with excitement young companion from where they stood in the kitchen making tea for themselves, hot chocolate for the young one, and pumpkin spice coffee for the inhuman, Alya exclaimed just as cheerfully as her mom, "We got pumpkins!"
"Did you, my little monkey?" Simmons said as she came walking over to her daughter, already knowing full well that Alya and Daisy had been out pumpkin and Halloween candy shopping, and able to see the two large orange gourds that Daisy was carrying, one in each hand. "How wonderful!"
As she picked up her daughter in a big hug, Daisy set the two pumpkins down on the table before turning to her husband and saying, "Hey Fitzy, come help me carry the rest of the pumpkins in."
So as Simmons began chattering away with Alya about the pumpkins, and their scientific name, and what kind of faces they were going to carve in them, Fitz and Daisy went back outside to grab the remaining four pumpkins and bags of Halloween candy that Daisy had bought and carry them inside. Returning a minute later carrying two pumpkins and a grocery bag of sweets apiece, they set everything down on the table before Fitz headed into the kitchen to finish up everyone's drinks as Daisy went for the knives and paper and pencils to draw ideas on before they settled on the final designs for her to carve.
Soon all four of them were sitting around the table drawing ideas, sipping on their drinks, and chatting away, FitzSimmons taking their time and drawing nice designs that they knew Daisy couldn't possibly actually carve for them with the knives that they had on hand, Daisy drawing stick figures of all of them that also couldn't be made into jack-o'-lanterns, and Alya drawing as many different faces as she possibly could still being a child. Once they had more than enough options to choose from for the next century of Halloweens, Simmons and Alya began cleaning out the inside gizzards of the pumpkins so that they could make roasted pumpkin seeds, and of course the jack-o'-lanterns themselves, as Fitz and Daisy began sorting through all of the different drawings to choose the ones that they actually wanted to use.
By the time the first pumpkin was completely cleaned out and ready for carving, and Alya was already covered in a goopy mess of stringy orange stuff, Fitz and Daisy had selected eight of Alya's designs to put on four of the pumpkins, two on each side, and then two designs of Fitz's (being the engineer best at drawing) to put on the remaining two pumpkins, mirrored carvings (as best as possible) on each side of each pumpkin. And so as Simmons and Alya continued to make a mess cleaning out the remaining pumpkins on one side of the table, Daisy began cutting out the first jack-o'-lantern on the other side.
It took some time to carve out twelve faces, and the multiple pans of roasted pumpkin seeds were all done and already being eaten on by the time Daisy set down her knife for the last time after finishing the final pumpkin, but they certainly looked exquisite when she finally did. So the four of them immediately took the newly made jack-o'-lanterns outside, each of the three adults carrying two pumpkins apiece as Alya carried the LED candles to put inside of them. They soon had the six jack-o'-lanterns lined up on the small porch of the Lighthouse with the lights glowing inside of each one, dusk having fallen while they were inside carving them, making them glow wonderfully in the calm, cool late October night air that they had that evening.
And so as Alya ran around the yard like the child that she still was no matter how much smarter she was than her age, FitzSkimmons stood together and looked at what they had made as a family, Fitz standing in the middle with his two wives on either side of him, hugging them into his sides as they each wrapped an arm around his waist and hugged him back.