So, here it is, Grant's backstory. Hope you guys enjoy it.

May heard a few quiet laughs as she glanced up at her children playing All Fours in the living room. Grant had chosen Jemma as his partner, Skye and Trip were another pair and that left Leo and Lance to be a team. What made May smirk were everyone's comments towards Lance: 'Got something in your eye? You can't stop blinking', 'Your nose is hella itchy', 'You're kicking the wrong leg', 'You have a suit, don't you?'. It was inevitable, Lance was terrible at lying and faking and so far he and Leo had scored no points at all.

Leo tossed the cards on the floor, "Let's play something else. Lance sucks at this."

"Alright, let's play Go Fish," Trip said, gathering up the cards, "It's best for Skye too."

"I can play," she grumbled.

"And better than Lance," Grant piped up.

The sibling rivalry between Lance and Grant was evident; the two of them were always disagreeing unless the matter was pranks and teasing their other siblings. Other than that, the two of them were always scuffling. Luckily they'd make up as quickly as they'd wrestle. Coulson took a seat next to his wife as she signed a pile of reports. He had a smile on his face as they watched Grant being tortured by Lance. The younger boy was lying face up on the wooden floor, stomping his feet between giggles as his brother straddled him and tickled him, which was Grant's weakness.

"Oh, c'mon," Grant gasped and giggled, his face getting redder with each wheeze. "Stop it." he hysterically laughed again, "St-stop, Lance. I'm-I'm tick-ticklish. Stop!"

"Alright," Lance gave up, getting off top of his brother, "you've suffered enough for messing with me."

Grant remained lying down on the floor, both hands clutching his stomach as he tried to regain control of his breathing.

"Do you remember how Grant was when we adopted him?" Coulson quietly asked, looking back at his wife.

May sighed and smiled ever so slightly, "We've walked down a long, hard road."

Traumatized, emotionally detached, violent, unsociable. Dr. Maggie Morris, psychologist, only needed five words to describe Grant Ward when she first met him on an appointment when he was six years old.

It took her a year and a half of therapy to heal a broken little boy, but Dr. Maggie warned his parents that Grant would never be a normal child because part of his boyhood had been taken away prematurely. Coulson and May were very well aware of that when they first adopted him. Grant, unlike his siblings (with the exception of Lance), was adopted because he was chosen to be adopted, not because SHIELD called in for a favor from Coulson and May. After Grant's adoption, the two of them started having a different view of their children: they no longer saw them as only assignments; they fully accepted them as their children also.

One old acquaintance of May, knowing that she and Coulson had adopted two children, came up to her. Grant was all over the local news due to the horrible conditions in which he was found. The man knew no one would want to adopt him, and he thought that maybe Melinda and Phil would want to give it a shot. The couple wasn't sure if they'd accept the boy, but upon looking at his photos, it twisted their stomachs. Grant was full of bruises all over his body, he was thin and his eyes mirrored sadness and fear, nothing else. Grant had been found tied up to the house's radiator after his parents were taken into custody. Grant's older brother, Christian, reported them to the cops after being mercilessly beaten.

The child protective services thought of putting both boys together for adoption. They quickly gave up on the idea when Grant saw his brother and yelled, running away from him. It turned out Christian had bullied Grant too. The two were taken to different places, miles away from each other, and both were undergoing therapy. May and Coulson were bothered with Grant's case. It didn't make sense for them why those parents had children only to mistreat them. It filled them with anger towards the parents and sorrow for the boy. However, they were not going to adopt Grant to do a favor to May's acquaintance, and they certainly wouldn't adopt the kid out of any feelings of pity. The two of them felt he needed a home and they wanted their house to be Grant's home. When the couple met him at the orphanage where he was placed, their conversation wasn't extensive, as they expected.

Grant only had question, "I'll never see my parents or my brother?"

"No," Coulson said as he stooped down, "never again."

"Then take me to your home."

The first night Grant spent at the Coulson's was only the beginning of a year and a half of trouble. Grant was very much grateful for having a bed and a blanket, and no one that hurt him, but he was terribly scared of falling asleep. He had always had that fear (a very rational fear though); if he slept he wouldn't be awake and alert. At his old house, nights were the worst. That was when, for some reason that he failed to understand, he was beaten. Trip was merely turning in bed, sleeping, but Grant was scared that the sleeping figure in the other bed would get up to hurt him. So, he anticipated anything and jumped off bed. He grabbed the first thing he saw, turned out to be a toy car. He smacked Trip with it in the head and obviously the ten year old woke up with a scream.

Coulson and May weren't sleeping either so they got of bed as fast as bullets. When they got to the boys' bedroom, Grant was already running out the door and Trip was holding to his brow that dripped blood. Coulson tended to the boy, guiding him to the bathroom to treat the cut and May walked after Grant. Jemma also awoke up, startled, and it was up to Coulson to calm her down and try to get her to bed. Grant hid inside the cupboards in the kitchen. May told him she wasn't going to hurt him, she just wanted him out of there. It was no use telling him that. Grant just cried, tears running down his face and dripping off his chin, sobs racking his small frame.

At some point May sat down on the kitchen floor, waiting for him to come out. He had been crying for half an hour non-stop by then. Coulson showed up in the kitchen but May told him to go away. He had never seen such sadness and determination on his wife's face. Five hours went on and she hadn't given up. She kept on telling Grant she wouldn't hurt him, or even reprimand him. She just wanted him to crawl out of there. Eventually Grant's stomach growled with hunger (as he had chosen to stir the food around in the plate earlier at dinner) and May put on the floor, right before the counter's door, a plate with chocolate chip cookies and a glass of milk. The boy's hand slowly snuck out to steal a cookie, and then his head peeked out. Soon enough he was sitting on the tiled floor devouring the cookies.

"What are you afraid of, Grant?" May asked him.

He looked down and quietly whimpered, "I'm scared of falling asleep. That's-that's when my parents hit-hit me-"

"This isn't your old house. We won't hurt you, Grant."

Without a warning he crawled into her lap and fit his small body frame in her arms. His fingers knotted in the material of her T-shirt, not wanting to let go of her for a second as he cried harder. May rubbed slow circles on his back in an effort to ease the noisy sobs, the never-ending tears and his quiet mumbles in which he vehemently believed: 'I'm a bad. I'm a monster.' he repeated over and over again. After making sure Jemma and Trip were sleeping soundly, Coulson went to check on his wife and son again. He found Grant quietly sobbing, almost sleeping, and his wife with eyes closed, lullabying and smoothly rocking the boy.

"There was a boy, a very strange enchanted boy. They say he wandered very far, very far, over land and sea. A little shy, and sad of eye, but very wise was he. And then one day, a magic day he passed my way, and while we talked of many things, fools and kings, this he said to me: The greatest thing you'll ever learn is just to love and be loved in return."

Coulson sighed as he saw them and May opened her eyes. He knelt on the floor next to them and pressed a kiss on the boy's hair and then another on his wife's forehead. It was in moments like that that Coulson had the certainty that she was stronger than he could ever be; he wasn't sure he could have handled Grant the way she did.

For two whole months Coulson felt useless. Grant went to appointments with a psychologist and every time he wanted anything he went to his mother. He didn't even say a word to his father. May felt pity for her husband whenever she saw him trying to play with Grant and seeing that the boy wasn't even willing to talk to him. But Coulson never gave up and his perseverance paid off. One day, after an appointment, Grant walked to his father and offered him one of his soldier men.

"Play with me, dad."

Coulson felt like his floor had been swept away suddenly. He was overwhelmed but took the toy and played with him. After that day, the display of soldier men grew, lining up on the window sill of the boys' bedroom. Grant trusted the inanimate toys to keep him safe, and his father bought him as many as he wished, so that he'd feel safe.

Although Coulson and May did an extraordinary work in helping Grant through his problems, it was Jemma and Trip that deserved all the compliments. The little girl always had a smile to offer her older brother and the older boy was patient and forgiving, amazingly forgiving for a ten-year-old. Even though Grant had hurt him and barely talked to him, and even if he had all the reasons in the world to hate him, Trip waited for Grant to trust him.

Fifteen minutes later (after Trip and Skye won two rounds in a row of Go Fish and the others accused them of cheating) the kids changed the card game they were playing again. This time they were playing Bullshit and now Lance wasn't the only who was lousy at lying. Jemma was also terrible at it. She could barely hold the playing cards in her hand as she held almost the entire stack.

Grabbing a handful of them – about ten or fifteen – she put them on the center and said, "Three Jacks, four sixes, three sevens and one Ace."

Grant squinted and took a look at the cards he held; he had two sevens, there was no way Jemma could have three of them. "I doubt it," he said.

Jemma sighed and grabbed the stack of cards that was in the middle, knowing she had been caught lying again. Leo started laughing so hard that he fell on his back but continued laughing. Trip smiled and draped his arm around Jemma, cuddling her.

"You need to be a better liar, Jem."

"I don't want to be like Lance, thank you."

This time it was Grant who laughed loudly as Lance had a surprised expression on his face and couldn't even say anything in his defense.

Skye grinned, picked up all the cards and held them against her chest as she happily hoorayed, "I win!"

"That's not how - nevermind," Trip gave up on trying to explain her that the objective was to have no cards at all.

Coulson left the office room and met his laughing children in the living room, "Can Mom and Dad join you for-"

"No!" the six answered immediately.

"Do you remember when we played poker, Dad?" Jemma subtly reminded.

Everyone could still remember vividly the day the whole family played poker...

Two words about the next chapter: Mother's logic... Every mother has her own set of unique logic; May's no ordinary mother. :)