"She's a sweet child, isn't she?" Greg murmured, taking a drag on his cigarette.
Sherlock's fingers twitched ever so slightly, but in the end he simply rubbed the spot on his forearm where he'd applied the nicotine patch earlier. Melissa would know if he indulged himself, clever little girl that she was, and he didn't want to disappoint her.
"Thankfully, she takes after her mother," he shrugged. "Much easier for her, and for the rest of the world as well."
Truth be told, he had no idea how he would have handled a socially inept child as he himself had been. Fatherhood wasn't a foreign concept to him anymore, and yet it was still one of the most unexpected adventures he'd ever had to deal with in his entire lifetime.
He thought of Molly panicking on the bathroom floor about seven years ago, swatting his arm when he started lecturing her on the statistics for birth control; he recalled the arguments over the name they would choose for their daughter, arguments he knew right from the start he would win, because Molly was Molly and some things never changed.
Melissa stood for 'honey bee', and was therefore the perfect name for their little girl. On balance of probabilities she'd been conceived right here in the Sussex cottage where they hid away as often as they could, and even if there weren't any bees yet he was adamant there would be someday.
He would teach Melissa the art of beekeeping, and they would collect honey while discussing its chemical composition and the properties that derived from it. Then she would dance upon the shore, barefoot with her hair tumbling in the breeze – much like she was doing right now, hand in hand with her baffled and utterly delighted uncle.
"Sometimes I wonder whether she's mine at all," he mused somewhat dryly. "Gets along far too well with Mycroft for someone that shares at least half of my genes."
"Don't be a git," Greg chided him affectionately, and they fell back into a comfortable silence.