A/N: Written for Skyeward Month, Week 2, Day 2: romance/fluff. Also, this it the story where I reveal the name of the thirs Ward baby :)

Mothers Always Know

Although she can't be absolutely sure – well, it's not like they have ever… had sex so infrequently that it'd be easy to pin it down to one occasion –, but Skye has a pretty good idea when all three of her daughters were conceived.

Her firstborn, her little surprise, Haylie Grace, is the hardest to pinpoint: she came to be during the weeks after the Inhuman War, when Skye was living in a kind of haze – her father stripped of his memories, her mother confined in Lai Shi with a sentence that declared she may never leave or use her powers again, and her left with abilities she still hadn't completely made peace with.

She felt… lost. Uprooted. It was Grant who was her anchor during those times – like he had been before, and has been many times ever since.

One night she was peculiarly feeling like she was swimming in the middle of a whirlpool, being pulled underwater, and she had no idea what to do. Grant held her close in the safe, familiar haven of their bunk, whispering sweet words of love and reassurance into her ear, his thumb drawing nonsensical patterns on the small of her back.

She needed him – in more ways than one.

She kissed him, lying on the top of the covers, her arms sneaking around his neck and pulling him on top of her. His gentle caresses soon grew bolder, and his lips were burning her skin, and her fingers were buried in his hair.

But there was none of the unbridled passion or the playfulness or the urgency that so characterized their couplings back then. They made love slowly, gently that night, and held each other for a long time afterwards, him making promises to her she wasn't sure he'd be able to keep.

Haylie burst into their lives completely out of the blue as the consequence of maybe that night. Back then Skye used to think she fell pregnant at the most inopportune time – now she is certain Haylie knew very well when she had to come.

The conception of her second baby, Adalyn Camille, everybody's Ada, is a much happier tale. And quite clichéd, too.

Skye technically spent four days on a plane, trying to track down a gifted individual, chasing him all around the globe. She'd been so many countries and crossed so many time zones that she had no idea what the time – or even the day – was anymore, and this is how she ended up getting home on the morning of Valentine's day, not even being completely aware of this fact.

Grant – who had been home, taking care of Haylie the whole time – greeted her at the door, taking her bag and helping her shrug off her coat. She all but melted into his embrace, tucking herself under his chin, feeling every beat of his heart and inhaling his scent in. She was tired, yes, but she could already feel the familiar heat starting to build up in her core – four days without him was four days too long, especially when they were trying to have a baby.

He carefully extracted himself from her arms, kissed the top of her head, and told her to go and take a bath, while he took care of everything else – and not to worry about Haylie, Mama Audrey was more than happy to take her for the day (she pouted a little at hearing this, because she had been missing her baby, but at the same time she was kind of glad she could have Grant completely for herself for a couple of hours).

A bath sounded wonderful, so she'd obliged; he'd drawn her one – the tub was filled to the brim with sweet-scented foam, and he'd even lit a couple of tea candles in the bathroom. She was already smirking to herself; so he was planning something for the day, and knowing him, she suspected that he'd gone overboard once again (he used to do that, when romance was concerned, almost as if he was trying to compensate for something).

She soaked herself in the water until it was starting to cool down, washed her hair and shaved (because really, he was up to something, it was the least she could do), pulled on the PJs he'd lain out for her (her comfiest pair), then made her way to the master bedroom.

She laughed out loud when she entered the bedroom – because of course he'd gone overboard.

In the – what, forty minutes? – since she'd entered the bathroom, he'd pulled on fresh sheets (new ones, as they didn't look familiar), and decorated the room in general: there were rose petals on the floor, and she counted no less than five vases full of red carnations, not to mention the at least a dozen heart-shaped balloons floating over the bed. He had also prepared breakfast – she could see pancakes and waffles and bacon and fresh fruit, next to coffee and milk and orange juice, all tastefully arranged on the bed tray and on the low bench at the end of the bed.

Oh, Robot, she chuckled into her palm.

A pair of strong arms enveloped her from behind, his lips pressing against the delicate skin of her neck.

"Happy Valentine's day, love," he whispered into her ear.

They eat breakfast in the bed that day, feeding each other and messing with the balloons (most of them ended up on the ceiling somehow), before they devoured each other, perfectly messing up the neatly made bed (she felt a little sorry for the new sheets). She didn't leave the bed that much that day, and by the month's end, she suspected she was pregnant.

(Hunter was the first one who caught up on when Ada had most likely conceived, and loved to give them grief about it, which Skye took with annoyed amusement – after all, had the tables been turned, she would have done the exact same thing.)

She wouldn't want Coulson to know, but her littlest girl, Eleanor Hope, commonly known as Ellie, most likely was conceived in the new Triskelion.

It was early November of 2020, just after Ada's third birthday, and her father – his memories having been restored some time earlier – had all but begged her to let him take the girls for the night. Not that she needed that much convincing – it was actually nice to see him spoil Haylie and Ada rotten, almost as if he was making up now for not having been able to raise her.

She and Grant spent the bigger part of the day at HQ, taking part in the planning of a bigger, riskier operation involving several agents, aerial and technical support. It was well past nine o'clock by the time they finished, and the Triskellion had all but emptied by then, with just the night guards, and some insomniac analysts staying – which meant that the gym was just theirs.

They just smiled at each other and said that they were doing it for old times' sake, for all the training sessions they had in the cargo bay of the Bus and in the gym of the Playground. Any anyway, they hadn't had the time or the opportunity to spar with each other for some time, so why not now, when they had the time and place, when they didn't have to be anywhere else, and when surely nobody was going to interrupt them? So they put on their training clothes, and took over the mats.

(Of course, it wasn't like they didn't exactly know what they were getting into.)

It even started half-serious, like they actually wanted to train – there were some really nice moves, and she ended up on her a back couple of times before managing to kick his legs out from under him. But then things started to turn a little… not so serious. Mostly when they started to use some unfair tactics such as tickling and blowing raspberries and kissing (that was the cruelest). Because of course their old training-induced sexual tension had returned as well, and soon they found themselves engaging in a completely different kind of sparring match.

One that they were very familiar with.

The kind that didn't require clothes.

On the mats, in the middle of the Triskellion. (Oh, but was it good sex.)

But still, she is never going to tell Coulson how and where his youngest granddaughter was conceived – she values his sanity and Grant's wellbeing too much.