One Day At A Time - Revised Edition

All of the kids walk until the stars come out, their candy bags getting heavier and heavier.

After what seems like hours, they step onto the porch of the last house.
Anne and Andy had been switching off ringing the doorbells of the houses.

They all happily say, "Trick-or-Treat" one last time and they're rewarded with king-sized Snickers bars.

The walk back to Ava's house takes a long while.

"My feet hurt!" Andy groans.
"Mine too!" Anne agrees with him, which prompts everyone else's moaning and groaning.
They're all worn out, but it's worth it when they eventually see Ava's house in the distance.

All of them shuffle into the house and drop down onto the living room floor.

"How was it?" Donna asks, turning to face the group of exhausted kids on her floor.
"We almost got killed my Mike Myers!" Andy tells her, he takes off his mask and sets it beside himself, relived he can properly see again.

Lucas, still playing along, looks at him with fake panic in his eyes.
"He's right! Those slow-pokes almost got attacked!" He says, pointing a thumb at Ava and Lilly, which makes Ava perk up.
"I kept Lilly safe!" She states matter-of-factly, proudly.

A mix of exhaustion and excitement is buzzing through the living room as Anne asks everyone after they've all calmed down,
"Can we trade our candy now?"

The big kids look at each other and nod.
Thus begins the candy sorting.

Rose has their candy sorted by the two vague categories of, "fruity" and "chocolate." Lucas doesn't even bother with sorting his candy, he just has a big mountain of sugar in front of him.

Lilly attempts to sort her candy in an organized way, but she gives up after putting all the Hershey bars in one big pile, leaving the rest as its own mass of everything.

Ava sorts her candy meticulously, putting all the different types of candy into their own piles and stacks.
The little candies, like Warheads and gum balls, get put into piles, while the bigger candy bars get stacked up into neat towers. (She has a few more of the little candies than everyone else, so she is technically- by a few pieces of candy- right about the sword thing.)

Now, the real fun can begin: the candy trading.
As much as everyone wishes they could say it's a civil affair, it really isn't.

Five minutes into it, Lucas is throwing his king-sized Snickers bar across the living room at Andy so he can get a kid-sized handful of Warheads.

"I'll give you my Kit-Kats for your Jolly Ranchers!" Ava says to Rose.
"All of them?" Rose questions.
"Yes! All of them!"
"You've got a deal!" Rose grins as they scoot over towards Ava and switch off one thing for the other.

Everyone takes their turns yelling and trading with each other until they're all happy with their new piles.

Donna takes one last picture of the night, all of the kids tired-eyed and smiling with their chaotic piles in front of them.

Time goes on and soon, Rose and Lucas are about to leave, where Ava stops them at the door and thanks them for playing along with the little kids.

After they leave, Ava and Lilly scoop up their candy and go back to Ava's bedroom.

Lilly takes a seat in the desk chair; Ava is working on getting her hair down, the hair tie was quite tightly secured.

When she's about to offer help, Ava pulls it out and undoes the braid with her hands.

It's a rare thing when Ava's hair is down, since it's always loosely tied up and back.

Because of the braid, her hair is wavy now.

Lilly's immediate thought is that she loves Knight-In-Shining-Armor-Ava with wavy hair as opposed to the braid.

She looks at her silently for a moment, her heart beating like a hummingbird.

It's ridiculous, it's utterly ridiculous how good she looks with her hair down and how much Lilly loves something so simple.

Ava looks at her with a curious expression,
"Are you okay?"

Lilly blinks her eyes and clears her throat.
"Yeah. I'm okay, don't worry."

Telling Ava to, "not worry" does the opposite, because all she can do now is worry. If they have anything, it's a quite direct way of communicating; "don't worry" is anything but direct. (Ava has learned nuances such as someone saying that they're, "fine" actually meaning the opposite. Even with Lilly, a part of her still keeps those nuances in mind.)

Ava goes to take off her necklace, but she stalls for a second, clasping and unclasping the backing.
Another nervous stim of hers, though it's a more recent one than her shirt-tugging.

Lilly stands up and walks over to her.
"I'm sorry. There literally isn't anything to worry about, I don't know why I said it." (In contrast, Lilly has learned to be direct and say what she means. She has tried to throw out those backwards nuances to the best of her abilities, though there sometimes is still the occasional clash.)
After another second, Ava fully takes off the necklace and sets it on her dresser.
"Are you sure?"
"I'm sure."

There wasn't anything for Ava to worry about, though Lilly was worrying in her own mind.
Even in the dark, she could vaguely, vaguely see Ava's face flush after she'd been called Lilly's, "knight in shining armor."

It has never happened before.

Lilly doesn't want to over-analyze something as small as Ava's face slightly turning red, but she can't help it. She might've been seeing something, it was chilly outside, too, maybe-

She tries her best to push her thoughts to the back of her head as she settles into bed with Ava that night.

Despite her racing thoughts, Halloween this year was great. She goes to bed happy.

So does Ava.
She drifts off to sleep, dreaming about a vast, fantastic world.
She sees Lilly in her dream, too, walking by her side.