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Kate was so deep in thought that she almost missed her stop on the tube; recognising the tiled walls of the Baker Street station seconds before the familiar beeping announced the imminent closing of the doors. Leaping up from her seat, she almost made it off the train in time, getting her shoulder jammed in the closing doors just as she was congratulating herself on her swift exit. This earned her several disapproving looks from her fellow passengers, and left her feeling considerably more shaken than the experience warranted.
Arriving at the top of the escalators, she searched through her pockets for her Oyster card for several minutes, before realising that she had stuck it into the book that she had been unable to concentrate on as a bookmark. Definitely rattled. Sherlock would have given her a sideways glance of poorly concealed amusement, and then fired off an accurate explanation of exactly what had happened and why. She missed him, she realised, not for the first time. It seemed like a long time since they had done something as normal as sit on the tube together. It had taken her months to convert him to the joys of traveling on the underground; to the delights of watching your fellow passengers from behind The Metro or a book, of trying to work out people's professions; the contents of the twelve bags at their feet; the relationship between a grey haired man and the teenage girl with him; the cause of the argument between the young couple opposite. It was a game that Kate had played on trains with her sister from an early age, and then with Alice through her teenage years; making up stories about the other people in their carriage. As she had grown into adulthood, Kate had graduated from making her stories as preposterous as possible, to attempting to discern the truth, using both observation and her gift of empathy to try to discern the truth beneath the everyday veneers that people presented to the world.
Sherlock, unsurprisingly, had turned the game into a competition, until they were sparring with each other to see who could work out the most about their fellow travellers, communicating in low murmurs, or occasionally via text if the subject of their scrutiny was close enough to overhear.
Sherlock always won on detail and deduction, of course, but Kate often picked up things that he didn't, beating him on the subtle perception of conflicting emotions and medical diagnoses. The medical details Sherlock quickly leant and assimilated, studying Kate's old membership exam books voraciously until he could beat her to the diagnosis; the empathy he found more challenging. 'But how do you know?' he would ask, staring at her intently. 'You said that she was angry with him; what made you think that?'
'I just - knew,' Kate would say with a shrug.
And Sherlock would shake his head and tell her that wasn't possible; that she couldn't just pick up emotion from being near someone, that it had to be a learnt ability to pick up on subtle gestures, facial expression, something. Anything else..
'Just isn't logical?' she asked, completing his sentence for him. 'It isn't, that's what I keep telling you.'
He pretended to be frustrated by his inability to pick up this skill of hers, and the few times that it lead her to win the game. But the pleasure of it, as always, was not in the winning but in the intellectual exchange; in the ability to spark off each other. They had learnt so much from each other in this process, Kate mused as she walked slowly down Baker Street, or rather they had learnt so much about each other, about how each other's minds worked. In those early days she had found herself wishing that she could climb inside Sherlock's head, to view the cogs of his cognition whirring and clicking, like some huge, beautifully constructed machine; immaculately clean and uncluttered, and always perfectly oiled.
His head wasn't like that at all, she had come to discover. The great machine had been kept running only by the act of shutting everything else away behind vast steel doors, which intermittently leaked their jumbled contents of memory and emotion into the machine room; blocking the cogs and forcing Sherlock to shut it down entirely with drugs and sleep. Those had been his danger nights, although it had taken her until this illness of his to fully understand that.
These days, she wished that she could climb into his head for a different reason. She wished beyond all that was rational that she could go into those rooms while he slept, and sort out the memories for him. She wanted to be able to organise it all, placing them on shelves and in drawers, like tidying a child's bedroom, until he was left with a neat record of his past to sort through and finally come to some sort of peace with. And yet in a strange way, perhaps that was exactly what he was asking her to do by investigating his past with John.
Looking up, she found herself only a few doors from 221B. She remembered something that Sherlock had said to her in the early days of his illness - about wanting to keep on walking, to walk out of his life. What Kate wanted at that moment in time was almost the diametric opposite. She wanted, entirely irrationally she was aware, to be able to walk back into her life; as if these last couple of months had been some strange dream, and she could wake up, safe in Baker Street, and walk into the living room to find Sherlock, entirely sane and rational, hunched over his microscope, or arguing with John about a case.
Sherlock was getting better, of that she had no doubt, and for perhaps the first time since that awful night on the roof, she could see a way forward; could see him getting to a point where he would return home, get back to work even. Strangely, that thought made her feel even more alone. When he had been really ill she had been grateful that he was in the clinic, grateful that he was being looked after and she no longer had to feel so horribly responsible; grateful that she could return to being his girlfriend and not his nurse. Now she just wanted him back home in 221B where he belonged, and she was all too aware that there was still a long road to travel before that could happen.
Lost in thought, she didn't even notice that John's flat door was open and that he was standing in the doorway, a glass of wine in either hand, and almost walked past him on her way to the stairs, until his soft, 'Kate?' made her jump.
'Sorry, I was miles away,' she said, as she took the proffered glass of wine and followed him into his flat.
'Dinner's in the oven,' he said as she sat down on one of the sofas and gratefully took a gulp from the glass of wine.
'Bad day?' he asked.
'No,' she said with a frown, 'good day, or rather, Sherlock seems a lot better. I've just been thinking too much, thats all.' She smiled at John, to show him that there was no need for his concerned, 'I'm here if you need to talk,' look. Company would do her more good than navel gazing this evening, of that she was convinced. Better to find a practical way to help Sherlock than to waste time on introspection.
'He seemed very calm when I popped in to see him earlier,' John said, and Kate silently blessed him for choosing to take her comments at face value. He knew her well enough to know when she needed to talk and when she wanted distraction. Good. Time to plan the way forward, then.
'How was Mycroft?' Kate asked, suddenly remembering that today had been the day of the great interview.
'Surprisingly forthcoming,' John told her; then at Kate's expression of surprise, 'Well no, you're right, to start with he was cagey, but then he did a bit of a U-turn. Dismissed Andrea, told me that he would tell me whatever was necessary to help Sherlock and that was exactly what he did.'
He gave Kate a brief summary of the information that he had gained from Mycroft. 'I'll give you a copy of my notes when I've finished typing them up,' he said, 'but there's something else, Kate, something that Mycroft showed me that I don't have a clue what to do with.' He picked up a document wallet from the kitchen table and handed it to her. 'I don't know how to begin to explain this,' he said. 'It's probably best if you see for yourself.'