So, with all of the little bits here and there that I've written in the Eurstrade universe about Eurus and Greg's pairing, I was thinking that maybe I should try something from their individual points of view… a little personal history of their relationship from start to where they sit as of "The Baker Street Girls", "Wondrous Mediocrity", and the other stories in that time frame, and references the Greg chapter in "The Adventures of Eurus Holmes". Also, a note that the sudden revelation that Greg has musical talent is inspired by my very recent "late to the party" Google discovery that Rupert Graves plays the guitar. This story is in two chapters and hopefully explains some of the smaller things for anyone who has read those other stories. For anyone who hasn't read them, I try to write my stories to be enough of a stand-alone as to not make the others required reading to understand what's going on.But if you have, I apologize for the subtle continuity oopsies, I am a mere fan who is plagued by plot bunnies and amateurish writing! ;)

So, here I am, sitting in my wife's music room, thanks to my pain in the ass brother-in-law.

I made the colossal mistake last week of letting the cat out of the bag by playing a classical arrangement with my acoustic guitar, accompanying Eurus, with Molly and Sherlock sleeping in the guest room down the hallway.

Or at least, I thought they were sleeping.

So much for keeping that one under my hat.

No sooner were we finishing up Eurus's arrangement of Ave Maria (Schubert this time, not Bach) when I looked up and saw Sherlock standing in the doorway, leaning up against the jamb with his arms crossed, wearing nothing but plaid boxers, a purple t-shirt, and one of his stupid "Gotcha Greg" grins. I'm sure he was already snapping together the way he would rattle off his deductions about the callouses on my fingers and the way I sometimes mindlessly wiggle them as though I were plucking at imaginary strings, whenever there's music in the background.

Then I made the even bigger mistake of admitting that yeah, maybe I write a little ditty too now and then, while I'm waiting for grout to cure and the like. Nothing fancy, just purging boring little tunes out of my system. Most of them sit in the drawer of my night stand, without a second thought given to them from the moment I put them there.

Now the old git thinks I should compose something for Eurus for our first wedding anniversary.

He's probably right.

But then, what the hell else is new? Sherlock Holmes is always right. Except when he's wrong – and even then he still manages to be right. A bloke just can't win with him.

If anyone had told me twenty-some odd years ago that I would fall in love with and marry the psychopathic baby sister of Sherlock and Mycroft Holmes, especially when I was slapping handcuffs on her at Musgrave Hall and placing her under arrest, I would have sent them over to Molly Hooper to find out just what sort of sweeties they'd been dipping into.

It's not like either Eurus or I meant to fall in love, or for that matter, even meet again after Sherrinford and Musgrave, and become friends. But Sherlock just happens to be one of my closest friends, and as it turns out, he has chosen to have so few friends on his short list that the ones he does have are pretty important to him. That list has included me for a very long time. I may not have been the cleverest of detectives in my day, but I wasn't so thick I couldn't see that.

Sherlock and I have relied upon each other a great deal, and his best friend John Watson has always managed to be the zig to Sherlock's zag. I try to be the straight line through the middle of it, and the efforts at keeping those two arbitrary bastards on the straight and narrow are generally successful… most of the time. Sherlock's frequently eccentric behaviour has meant that he's always needed a straight man by his side, and that would be John Watson. So who's the straight man's straight man? Probably me.

So when Eurus Holmes, safe and but apparently no longer secure at Sherrinford, started to transform herself and find her humanity trickling in, of course Sherlock had to drag me into it by keeping me in the loop. Eurus was going on the lam, he said. She's totally harmless, he said.

He was probably right.

Now I'd be lying if I didn't admit that there was something in her beautiful blue eyes that mesmerized me from that day onwards, and the way she would sing these impossibly sweet lullabies to John's daughter Rosie, and Sherlock and Molly's son Will. The woman has the voice of an angel – how's that for God's honest irony? And of course she's clever, far more clever than Sherlock and Mycroft put together. Believe me, that's saying a lot.

She seemed so vulnerable back then, as if she were unsure of where she really fit in outside of Sherrinford – or if she even fit in at all. So she spent time with family as much as she could, and after Sherlock revealed her to me, we started spending quite a lot of time together as well. I arranged my day off to co-ordinate with the day she generally visited.

We spent a lot of time in the cinema, now that I think back on it. I learned she loves mysteries and suspense, the cheesier and more far-fetched the better. She will sit through a romcom now, though that's only been recently, and she has come to prefer the large screen tv and the loveseat in our living room to an actual cinema these days. Letting her steal my popcorn – heavy on the butter and light on the salt – was a small price to pay back then for my clever girl's advice when Sherlock got too busy being a dad to consult with some of the more difficult cases that would come across my desk. I have never begrudged him that role, all I have to do is look at the amazing people Rosie and Will have become to see that it was time most wisely spent.

But I still haven't told her, all these years later, that I never really did like butter on my popcorn. Even now, she sneaks it out of my bowl after she's emptied her own.

So we went on like that for, like I said, twenty-some odd years, getting closer and closer, spending more and more of her free time together, watching Rosie and Will grow up and develop their life's ambitions, at least the ones that didn't involve being married to each other. And of course, Eurus joining in whenever she could to solve cases with Sherlock and John when I needed to call them in for assistance.

I'm not sure exactly when I realized I'd fallen in love with Eurus, but at that point I know she'd been my best friend for years. I suspect it was around the time the new governor at Sherrinford kiboshed her LOA's. They say you don't know what you've got until it's gone, and bloody hell was that ever the truth.

Suddenly, she wasn't there every week anymore, and I found myself missing her with this impossible ache in my chest. I actually wondered if my ticker wasn't starting to give me a bit of trouble.

I was probably right.

But it wasn't in any way that a cardiologist would do anything about.

We still managed to see each other whenever Mycroft managed to get her out for a day at a time, and once in a while I would accompany Sherlock on the helicopter flight out to Sherrinford… but I think at that point I was all about pulling a Sherlock and supressing all of those special little feels, for nobody's good but my own.

And then I reached that magical age and filed the proper paperwork, and suddenly I was Detective Inspector Greg Lestrade, Retired. And I found myself with a hell of a lot of time on my hands.

When Rosie and Will finally decided to get married, they invited me as family. Their Aunt Eurus and I had been inseparable, and they grew up seeing that and even considered me to be an honourary Uncle. But the calm serenity of retirement wasn't sitting well for a retired DI, I was accustomed to having my mind occupied all day, every day, so I couldn't resist the golden opportunity to have a more active role in their happy day. I'd organized investigations for years – how hard could a wedding be?

I was right about that one, for once. It was simple enough, especially since Rosie had no patience for "bridezillas" and vowed to never become one herself. Rosie Watson has always had focus, and has never gone back on her word. But more importantly, it kept me from becoming just bloody bored. As for Will, Sherlock had advised him of the "smile and nod" approach to wedding preparations. He had input of course, which Rosie was always agreeable to, but for the most part, Will intended, just as Sherlock had done on his own wedding day, to "dress up, show up, and shut up." Will and I spent a lot of time together running around London those months leading up to the big day, bringing Rosie's wedding day visions, and some of his own too, to fruition.

Maybe it was the sentiment of the day, but when I nicked Rosie skulking around the upstairs level where Will, Sherlock, John, and later, Mycroft, were preparing themselves, I escorted her back to the room downstairs where Molly and Mrs. Hudson were helping her to get ready. When we walked in, there was Eurus, on a two day leave thanks to Mycroft's maneuverings, and as always ready to tease me.

It might have been that I'd been missing her more than usual what with the emotional atmosphere of the wedding day, but with her standing there in an elegant blue dress that made her eyes a more mesmerizingly attractive shade of blue than I'd seen in all the years I'd known her, and set off by her raven hair done up in one of those formal styles, she was about as beautiful as I've ever seen her look... and I'd had more than ample time to become accustomed to the way she looked.

So, I found myself throwing caution to the wind and just flirting with her.

Things kind of snowballed from there that day.

The rest, as they say, is history.

Oh, except for that unexpected bit when Mycroft found out we'd decided to just go for it, and pulled in the last half dozen or so of his favours, arranging for Eurus to be permanently released from Sherrinford and into my custody the day after Rosie and Will wed. For some reason Mycroft thought that a retired Detective Inspector who happened to be in love with his sister would be a good candidate to take legal charge of her.

He was probably right.

From there it's been smooth sailing, for the most part. I moved her into the little cottage I purchased when I retired. It's small and cozy, enough upkeep and refurbishing to keep me occupied, but in well enough shape to take my time with it with little urgency. I've been bored, but not so bored I'd buy a house that would see things fall off if I stared at them too hard.

Marrying Eurus seemed a natural step after all of that.

Dusting off my guitar after hearing her playing in the room I fixed up for her seemed another natural step. I'll be honest here, we've been having a lot of fun in that room. Some of it even produces music.

I never claimed to be much of a composer but I've had a few ideas, silly little drabbles that find their way to the blank music sheets Eurus always has ample supply of. I mostly only write them down to stop them from running through my head like a broken record. Like scratching an itch.

But, I suppose the old git whose sister I married may be on to something.

Sherlock has reminded me that music doesn't have to be perfect to be beautiful, that it's not what you play but how you play it, and the same thing goes for composing… and in this case, composing is just another way to tell Eurus how very much I love her.

He's probably right.