A/N: I'm alive! Sorry for the lack of updates – university is keeping me pretty busy, plus I have been working on a longer story (that hopefully be published sometime next week). But until then, thank you for your patience!

The Task at hand

Grant Ward has been trained for a great many things – diffusing bombs, shooting targets from a thousand yards, hand-to-hand combat, and every conceivable form of espionage. But not for this.

Definitely not for this.

He just wanted to be a considerate boyfriend – because that's what he was now, a Boyfriend, with a capital B, and he had been for fifteen days (not that he was counting), and although he had absolutely zero experience in this occupation, he was determined to make a good one, because Skye deserves that. (Hell, she deserved the world, neatly wrapped with a bow on the top, and if it was up to him, that's what she was getting.)

But back to the original problem – so he was on his way back to the Bus after running an errand for Coulson, and he stopped at a store to get a couple of things (like pretzels for Fitz, because that always seemed to disappear from the galley), and, being the thoughtful boyfriend he was (he strived to be), he shot a text to Skye, asking her if she needed anything.

This is where his problems started.

Could you grab me some tampons, please? her message read.

He must have either paled or went beetroot red when he read it, he isn't sure, and he stared at the message for a couple of seconds, but then mentally shook himself and, intent on the task, went to find the aisle that housed this kind of product. It was just grabbing a cardboard box from a shelf; no big deal. He could do this, easily. No reason to freak out or feel ashamed, or anything.

Only it was a big deal, he realized as soon as he reached the shelf he needed.

Because who would have thought that that there were so many kinds of tampons? There were different sized and colored boxes, there were scented ones and tampons with different texture, and some came with cute little tin boxes. It was puzzling.

And honestly, how he was supposed to choose?

At first, he was determined not to call or text Skye – he wanted to look competent (because what would it tell about their relationship is he failed to do this little task on his own?), and that meant being able to choose the right one on his own.

So he spent the next ten minutes comparing the different tampons, with strategic precision – price per piece, what kind of materials were used, size, any other attributes. But even after having read the back of at least a dozen boxes, he still wasn't any smarter, so he tried another strategy – choosing simply the one that felt the most sympathetic.

(Oh, God, he was pathetic…)

So he grabbed a box and carelessly tossed it into the cart. But then a second later he reached for it again, pulled it out, set it back on the shelf, and reached for another.

After his fourth try, he admitted it wasn't working, so he gave up and texted Skye.

What kind do you need?, he wrote, then stared the his phone's screen impatiently.

While waiting for her answer, his mind really started to go overdrive – because, yeah it was just a tampon, and anyway, why should he have known what kind of tampon she used? But it also made him realize that there were too many things he didn't know about her – like, even after living together on the Bus for three months, he still had absolutely no idea how she handled her periods (hell, he didn't know how any woman dealt with her cycle, period). Or what kind of shower geln-she used. Did she prefer Chinese or Thai food? Cats or dogs? Did she fold her socks or rolled them up?

Thankfully, the next moment his phone chimed.

The brand doesn't matter. The simplest you can find, middle sized.

Then, a second later:

Thank you! I 3 you

There's no nice to put this – he grinned like an idiot as he read this.

Encouraged by that little heart, he picked up a box that matched Skye's criteria (and then added two other boxes from different brands, just for good measure), while thinking that he might not have known what kind of tampon to buy, but he knew other, more important things – like how she liked her coffee, and that she loved to cuddle, and that she had the sweetest laugh he's ever heard and that her hair smelled like a forest meadow in the Spring, amongst thousand and thousand other things.

And that's what mattered, right? Everything he could pick up over time.

(By the way, he also ended up buying her some chocolate and a teddy bear, because yeah, she deserved the whole world wrapped up, topped with a bow.)