Just as Sherlock wraps up his tour of the first floor, he and Y/N are summoned downstairs by Aunt Mildred---the family's foghorn---hollering for them up the stairs.
Everyone is crowded into or around the porch at the side of the house, perching on benches and leaning against walls so they can push their feet into the dozens of pairs of Wellington boots sprouting from the flagstone floor like muddy, rubbery fungi.
Mr Holmes has evidently parted with his ducks for long enough to join the family's walk because he's holding Mrs Holmes' arm as she dons her wellies.
They're sky blue and patterned with bumblebees.
His face brightens when he spots Sherlock approaching and pulls him in for a one-armed hug, still supporting his wife with his other. "Sherlock! My boy! How are you?" At one point his bright green eyes he must have been more or less level with Sherlock's own seafoam blue, but age has shrunk him, his full head of hair ---albeit, grey hair---just about brushing Sherlock's chin. "Sorry I couldn't meet you at the door; duck escaped again."
"It was eating my begonias " Mrs Holmes mutters under her breath.
Y/N notices that even though he's about to trek across the British countryside---below a green peacoat---Mr Holmes is wearing his trademark tatty brown waistcoat and a red bowtie.
Several white feathers protrude from the knit of his jacket and Y/N plucks them free, smiling and he turns to her, greeting her with a hearty kiss on the cheek. Although he's spent the day with water foul, he smells pleasantly of freshly cut grass. "How was the drive?"
"Oh yes, dear," Mrs Holmes cuts in worriedly, "did you remember the way?"
"Yes, Mum," Sherlock assures.
"And you have someone to look after your apartment while you're away?"
"We don't have anything that needs looking after."
"And they won't miss you at work? They know you're taking time off?"
"I work for myself so I don't know whom I would tell---" Sherlock has his boots on already, and holds Y/N steady as she dons her own (all the good benches and leaning walls already being taken).
Not owning a pair of rubber boots due to the fact she lives in the most pavement-rich city in England, Sherlock had taken Y/N to Mountain Warehouse and bought her a pair especially for the trip, insisting they would be essential. Like Prince Charming searching for Cinderella with a glass slipper, he had slipped them onto her feet one by one until she'd found a pair she liked; [colour] ones patterned with [up to you].
"And you ate some lunch, didn't you?"
"We stopped at a petrol station," Sherlock says truthfully; he had indeed enjoyed a bag of mini brownies and a toasted cheese sandwich.
Mrs Holmes seems to think that isn't nutritious enough because when they pass through the garden, she picks a handful of raspberries from her vegetable patch and ties them in a cotton hankie. "They're for the both of you, mind," she warns Sherlock with a stern look, pushing them into his hands.
Y/N catches him rolling his eyes but unwraps the little bundle happily all the same.
...
Finally assembled in the driveway like a group of university professors forced to partake in a team-building exercise, the Holmes family---and Y/N---begin their evening constitutional.
They start as one large group of wool coats, canes and Wellington boots, but soon have to narrow into pairs to filter through the little garden gate. Pressed into the hedge lining the front garden, it leads into the farmland surrounding the cottage and they set off down a well-trodden track.
Dusk is already pooling over the treeline in that watery, English way it does. The summer sky had been crisp and clear all afternoon, meaning the night will carry a chill to it.
Y/N can already feel it seeping into the seams of her light summer jacket, the grass beading with dew slick against her wellies.
"How are they?" Sherlock asks in that uncanny way that always makes Y/N think perhaps he can read her mind. He holds the raspberries between them and they work through them happily, watching the landscape slide by.
Stepping purposefully into a pool of healthy, soft mud:
"Perfect, thank you."
As the group cross the field opposite the cottage, many Holmes hands, young and old, reach out absently amid their conversations to feel the wheat on either side of the path brush their skin. Already beginning to turn buttery yellow and crisp to the touch, Y/N lets the dry cornels tickle her own palm.
"So," she begins, dropping back a little from the group until the dirt below her feet is indented with the tread of many different-sized wellies. She lowers her voice. "Who is who?"
Matching her pace as though they're joined at the hip, Sherlock points to the man right at the front of their convoy.
He is shorter than the rest, the wheat barely tickling the belt of his very high trousers, probably due to his immense age. Wielding a carved ivory-topped cane---using it to brandish at things rather than lean on---he's wearing full military dress, although it's faded and shabby and too large for his time-shrunken frame.
Y/N suspects he hasn't played an active part in the armed forces since the early eighties, but he marches ahead of the group with determined energy and vigour, his many medals jangling like bells in the still air.
"That's my great-grandfather on my dad's side. He's called Harrold, although everyone calls him The Colonel." Sherlock moves his hand over slightly to point at the little grey-haired woman holding The Colonel's arm with a tiny gloved hand.
"My great-grandmother---his wife---is called Miriam. She was only a teenager in World War Two but, disguised as a schoolgirl, she ran secret messages between army bases. That's where she met Harrold, although he was just a Private then. They said if they both survived the war they'd get married, which they did on September third, 1945.
They had two sons, Michael, and my grandad George. Michael died before I was born but Grandad George is that man with the beard; he hasn't cut it for seven years."
Y/N thinks Grandad George looks a little like Brian Blessed.
"You know fruitarians?" Sherlock asks. "He's the opposite. George has never eaten an apple in his life. He's married to Nana Trudy. She was an Olympic high jumper but I can't remember which Olympics.
My dad is their eldest son. Next is Wilber; he's an ornithologist. He can't speak so his teachers and doctors said he was stupid, but he isn't. He can mimic the call of every bird he's ever heard and earned a PhD by studying how environmental pressures affect isolated populations.
His twin, Digby, can talk, but only about one thing, it seems, which is quantum mathematics. I never really know what to say to him but he gets along very well with Mycroft. I always got along better with Aunty Eunice. She's Trudy and George's only daughter and she hasn't worked a day in her life because her father-in-law invented Scrabble. She and Uncle Jack use their inheritance to travel the world and she'd always bring me presents that Mum didn't approve of."
"Like what?" Y/N asks, picturing perhaps a pocket knife or a VHS of Halloween Five.
"That cow skull on our wall, for one. My first motorcycle and, one year, a pet marmoset."
"I didn't know marmosets could be pets."
"They can't, really, so we had to give him to Marwell Zoo. We called him Mr Stinks, because he did. Anyway, after Eunice they had Barclay. He was in the Marines piloting submarines. He's spent more time underwater than on land, and won a Nobel prize for poetry.
His wife is called Barbra but we all call her Babs. She's a neurologist from Sweden and she had twins---Ammeline and Adaline---but you don't need to bother telling them apart. They dress alike to confuse people on purpose even though they're in their forties. They made up a secret twin language when they were younger that they still use sometimes."
Reaching the end of the field, they enter a thicket of trees, the path overgrown with stinging nettles and brambles. In the fading light, Y/N's eyes find these people one by one.
Despite every member of the party wearing wellies and almost identical coats, the people Sherlock describes are easy enough to pick out from the bunch.
Wilber must be the man with the camera around his neck with a lens so long it knocks against his knobbly knees. His twin shares his narrow face and wide, thoughtful eyebrows but appears uncomfortable amongst the wildlife, avoiding the mud and prickly plants with ungainly, overly-wide steps.
Some way ahead of them strides the wide, sturdy shoulders of Barclay, a few low hanging branches brushing his tightly chopped crew cut. A foot shorter than him, he helps Babs over a fallen tree branch by holding her little waist in his bear-paw hands and lifting her as though she were a ballet dancer.
Their daughters inherited her platinum blonde hair and it swishes in unison about their shoulders as they walk in perfect step. They're chatting to a woman wearing heavy pearl earrings and a feather boa---who Y/N guesses Eunice---but Sherlock says, pointing to her:
"That's Francesca. She swam the English channel and, when she got there, met Pierre. They got married immediately and had seven children, one of which for expelled from Eton when he was thirteen for stealing from the chemistry labs. He's obsessed with physics and made a working reactor in his tree house. It was so radioactive it had to be disposed of in a desert.
Francesca is my mother's sister, along with Mildred, whom you met. Her lizard escaped. She has five more, all named after Greek Gods."
"Did she ever find it? The missing one."
"Not that I know of," he waves off her concern as if it doesn't really matter that a four-foot lizard is still roaming his parent's country home.
Perhaps it is a regular occurrence.
"Anyway," he glances at Y/N's face to assure himself he is not boring her.
Finding interest there, he continues happily:
"Mildred failed all her O-levels but she doesn't care because she thinks formal education is stupid. She built her own house in the woods and makes money by selling sculptures. There's one back at the house, you may have seen it in the foyer. It's of two otters."
Y/N had seen it, but that's not what she had thought it was. Although that's the point of art, she supposes.
Mother also has a brother called Cecil who works in the House Of Lords; he taught me to play violin and speaks eight languages. He doesn't show any facial expressions and he won't look you in the eye but if you ever have a problem, whatever it is, you can go to him and he'll fix it."
Y/N regards the tall gentleman in the smart suit, picturing the words in his head filed away in neat cabinets. She nods, making mental notes, although they're getting confusing; names not just of people but of lizards scribbled over her mind's eye.
"My mother's mother died when I was young, but her husband is over there---no, him---with the kilt. He was twenty years younger than her but he loved her so much he never remarried and the family sort of adopted him."
"And those people?" Y/N gestures to the rest of the group, all chatting in little clumps.
"More cousins and second cousins, mostly. I'm the youngest so I always saw them more like aunts and uncles; they're all around Mycroft's age."
"Have they had children? Where are the children?" Y/N asks, realising embarrassingly late that the family reunion is missing a generation.
"Boarding school or at home with babysitters, which is a shame because I wanted to introduce you to Samuel. He's obsessed with bugs so whenever we meet I bring him a photo of a crime scene and, in exchange, he shows me something from his collection. He had a tarantula last time."
"All these people aren't staying at your parent's house, are they?" Y/N asks---picturing them stacked in the cottage's rooms like sardines---but Sherlock shakes his head.
"Most of them are staying in the village." His lip twitches. "I pity the bed and breakfast staff."
Y/N can't tell if he means because his family is eccentric, or because there are a lot of them.
Perhaps both.
"I bet you can't remember all their names," he challenges with a smirk, as if, once again, reading her thoughts.
"What do you bet?"
Sherlock thinks for a moment, ducking under a low-hanging branch. "A Cream Egg."
"Do you have a Cream Egg?"
"Not on me but you'll have to trust I've got one at the house."
"Okay, deal." The path veers to the left and Y/N dodges around the entrance to what she assumes is a badger set. Counting on her fingers:
"Well, there's Harrold and Miriam. Michael, George, Nana Trudy. Wilber, Digby. Eunice, Barclay. Francesca, Mildred. Obviously your parents and Mycroft---where is Mycroft? Did he stay at the house?"
Suddenly, up ahead, the Colonel holds up a tight, boney fist and, in unison, the line of Holmeses comes to an abrupt halt.
Silence falls like a blanket as they freeze, but then, among the blackbird's shrill song and the leaves whispering to each other, Y/N hears it:
A footstep in the crisp leaf litter.
Desperately, she rakes the maze of tree trunks, the low silvery fog building about their roots, smothering the meadow grass for the reason they have stopped---
---softly and slowly, she feels Sherlock take the line of her jaw between finger and thumb.
She lets him gently direct her gaze to a clearing, and her breath catches in her throat.
A red deer grazes a little way off the path, its head lowered to skilfully nibble the blackberries off the bushes just beginning to fruit. Seemingly indifferent to the guests passing through his woodland, he leisurely tears the unripe berries with its strong, flat teeth, the setting sun lighting up its large brown eyes with amber. They swivel to locate the juiciest specimens, its breath blooming in swirls of condensation about its wide, flared nostrils.
Nervously, Y/N regards its branch-like antlers, so close she can make out each stain of moss and each scuff of bark. A scar from the rutting season heals pink among the coarse, wiry fur of its vast shoulder, a strong muscle flexing as it takes a step forward with a massive hoof. The bracken snaps below its immense weight like bones, sending plumes of gnats and pollen into the air.
The buck's size more apparent now, Y/N subconsciously feels about beside her and finds the solid length of Sherlock's arm, her fingers closing on his coat sleeve. With exhilaration and a mix of curiosity and fear, she grip's it, entranced.
She almost jumps when she feels Sherlock's hand wriggle a little lower, his fingers slotting into the spaces between hers.
Distractedly, she clings to his warm palm as, hearing some distant sound, the stag raises its massive head, one ear swivelling to the left, and then the other to the right.
Deciding it is time to move on, it disappears into the undergrowth, the hawthorn branches parting to let him pass like servants bowing to their king.
There are several long moments where nobody moves; the group motionless---
---then The Colonel lowers his fist and they resume their walk, the sound of good-humoured chatter and wellies combing through grass starting up once more.
It takes a couple of paces for Y/N to realise she is still holding Sherlock's hand.
She looks down at their clasped fingers and her cheeks flush---
---but he is holding hers too.
She doesn't let go.