A/N: Make-up piece for SkyeWardWeek day 3: fluff (sorry guys, I was working on an essay).

The Ballet Fiasco

To be honest, Skye have never thought that she would ever get to experience anything like this – attending a freaking open dance lesson, watching her five-year-old do shaky, ungraceful little steps in her adorable pink dress.

Not that she is complaining.

It's a smaller miracle that both her and Grant could come – workload has been heavy at HQ recently; she had a case with a gifted kid in Idaho last week, and he just came back from Chile yesterday –, but they are here now, sitting among other proud parents, like the members any other ordinary suburban family (she wants to laugh).

She barely pays attention as the dance teacher – coach? Instructor? She has no idea what the right term is – steps forward and does her little speech about how great the class is and how much the girls have improved in the last couple of months. Basic pep talk – she has heard enough of these. So instead of the teacher, she focuses on her little girl (her bigger little girl), standing in the line of little, pink tutus, grinning excitedly and waving at them.

She has no clue where Haylie got the idea to get into ballet from – but she did, absolutely out of the blue one day, and with a stubbornness she could have inherited from either her or Grant (Skye is going to stick to this excuse until the end of days) she kept demanding lessons until Skye found a class they could take her to–and a good one, too. Still, it was a bit… odd, to her at least. They were not classy ballet-and-opera people (but she quite enjoyed blaming it on Grant's WASP genes), and Haylie seemed to be too impatient, too restless, too vivid for this kind of dance, at least in her opinion.

And yet, Haylie thoroughly loved the classes.

Finally having finished her speech – making Skye blink as she suddenly comes back to the present –, the teacher steps aside and starts the lesson, first instructing the dozen little girls to form a line along the rail, then starting to give them instructions in a jargon she doesn't understand – and anyway, her eyes are only on Haylie.

Damn, her daughter is adorable. Like super adorable – way more adorable than other kids (and she is not biased, not at all). Haylie is completely focused on the task, even the tip of her tongue is peeking out between her lips as she concentrates. She loses her balance at the third step, Skye notices, but then quickly corrects it, and finishes the set beautifully (Skye claps for her, but then looking around she notices that, according to dance practice rules, this might not be the most appropriate behavior).

But she couldn't care less – it's the other moms' loss.

The class goes on with the girls repeating seemingly the same steps again and again, and honestly, if it wasn't for Haylie, Skye would find the whole deal an absolute bore.

But it seems like she is not alone – she soon stars to notice that Haylie's patience is wearing thin, too. Her concentration falters, she misses a steps, keeps stealing glances towards her family – it's not hard for Skye to see the telltale signs that Haylie is about to get… creative.

"Oh-oh…" she whispers softly. "We are so done."

"It doesn't mean anything yet," Grant tells her under his breath, apparently having noticed the same signs, too.

But before Skye could answer him, Haylie does get creative – she stops doing the steps altogether, looks around the room for a moment almost as if she was lost, then, when her gaze meets her mother's, she grins and turns towards the railing, grabs it, and, before anybody could stop her, she is already pushing herself away from the floor, and the next moment she is hanging upside-down between the wall and the railing, her legs up in the air, her skirt falling down, giving into gravity.

And she is just grinning as the other girls continue their sets and the teacher freezes for a moment, then rushes to her help.

Skye swallows (yep, that's her daughter), then jerks her head towards Grant, wanting to see his reaction. Well, the expression on his face is somewhere between a frown and an I'm-about-to-laugh. He swallows, too, his Adam's apple bobbing as the corner of his mouth twitches.

She almost laughs out loud.

"We are so going to get thrown out," she whispers, giving into her grin.

"We so are," he agrees, staring forward as the mortified dance teacher finally rushes to Haylie to get her off of the rail before she falls.

(Well, Skye has always said that ballet wasn't the best choice for Haylie.)