John
We only kissed; nothing else. I just wanted to let Sherlock know how much I appreciated all he'd tried to do for me and how I never wanted to be without him. I had had no life before him and I would have no life after. He was my life. I had been so alone and he had saved me and now, even when I felt I was teetering between the abyss of desperation I never wanted to go again and clinging onto my life Sherlock had opened himself up to me and reached out with words. He had told me about his mother which must have been very painful and certainly Mycroft had seemed surprised when I'd told him by text. I owed my very existence to Sherlock Holmes.
As soon as Sherlock had slunk off into his room to ruminate to the evidence we'd collected I knew that I was going to kiss him. I'd been repressing what I'd felt for him for quite a long time and had it with pretending so his sharing his feelings with me provided the perfect excuse. I couldn't do such things without losing my inhibitions so I sat at the breakfast bar in the kitchen and drank a few beers which I'd retrieved from next to a new edition of severed toes in the fridge. On about the third beer I texted Mycroft about what Sherlock had told me and I even told him how I felt about his brother; as you may be able to deduce, I don't have a very high resistance to alcohol. After four cans of beer I considered myself drunk enough to kiss Sherlock and use my drunkenness as an excuse in the morning if things didn't go to plan. I was also drunk enough to think I was doing to the right thing.
After we'd kissed we lay next to each other on Sherlock's bed; he was under the sheets and I was on top of them. There were five layers between us. Sherlock was breathing heavily, I could see his chest expanding and contracting sharply beside me. I left Sherlock's room when I was sure he wasn't going to talk to me. I thought I would definitely be using my mildly inebriated state as an excuse for my seemingly spontaneous and almost certainly deluded actions in the morning.
Sherlock
I think I was probably in shock. John had kissed me. I had been kissed. I had lost my kiss-ginity. I had also enjoyed it but I didn't know whether I was quite to up to fully acknowledging that fact just yet. I lay on my after John had left the room and took deep breaths through my obstinate grin. I found that I had been subconsciously waited for the kiss to happen; it had seemed a natural continuation of our relationship although I thought that we would perhaps both be sober and it would be a bit more anticipated than it actually was. I had been thrown off balance by the sudden appearance of my drunken best friend lying on top of me and enthusiastically attempting to choke me with his tongue.
The authenticity of the feeling behind the act was questionable and I decided that John had probably only done it because he was feeling alone and vulnerable and I had revealed a small fraction of my innermost feelings to him so he had drunk himself silly and decided to thank me by introducing me to the art of kissing. With tongues. He would most likely have no recollection of the event in the morning which made me a mixture of sad and relieved. Anyway I was rather concerned by the way my thoughts were becoming almost as romantic as one of John's blogs so I cut them off abruptly; another talent I possess, and ruminated on the case for the rest of the night. I was restless at my inability to do anything useful until I visited the various members of my homeless network about the matching hoodies and illegal alcohol trading the following morning. I slept, for a time, which is a rare occurrence if you're me, which I am and when I slept I dreamt, which is even rarer.
In my dream I was sitting on a bench on the edge of a cliff, looking down at the churning grey sea forty feet below me. The cliff seemed to be eroding before my eyes and the scrabbly white sand in which the bench was fixed was slowly skittering over the precipice and into the violent swell of boiling froth. I was surprisingly calm considering my situation but at the same time perfectly aware that I could not and would not get off the bench. The ground was shifting beneath me and the bench was leaning further and further over the edge of the cliff until I was almost at a ninety degree angle to the swirling mass of ocean far beneath me. I seemed to be attached to the bench by some force other than gravity because if I hadn't been I would have already fallen off. I knew the bench and I would plunge into the waves and sink together. Before I met this fate, however, My eye snapped open and I was completely awake once more.
John was struggling into a cream cable knit jumper and few feet from the edge of my bed and yelling my name through the crochet.
"What is it?" I asked him, before remarking uncharacteristically uselessly "I was having a dream."
John ignored my unhelpful statement and growled "There are about a million tramps at the door who've scared poor Mrs Hudson almost out of her wits and now she's come to me. I assume they belong to you."
I sprung out of bed and jogged easily to the door, disregarding John's protests of "You're in your pyjamas!"
Behind the front door there were in fact only five tramps, all of whom belonged to my Baker Street irregulars; I opened the door and planted my feet firmly apart so my entire body was blocking the doorway and therefore protecting Mrs Hudson, who was cowering in a doorway in the hall, from the homeless. How ironic. The people were crowding on the moonlit pavement, shoving each other and clamouring at me all at once to try to be the first to present information and so receive money from me.
"Ladies and gentleman," I said to them, "Please calm yourselves. I will pay every one of you twenty-five pounds for troubling yourself to turn up here at this hour, although you could really just have waited until the morning in future, and I will increase that sum by what I see fit to whosoever provides me with information that is personally or professionally interesting to me or the case I am currently working on. Alright?"
The members of my homeless network arranged themselves into a grumbling despondent huddle on the doorstep and when I asked them to, formed an orderly line.
"Yes?" I asked the man at the front of the queue.
He coughed, sniffed, and held out grubby hands towards me, "Twenty-five pound, please." He said. I could tell from his manner and his shoes that he had no information, he just wanted the initial money.
"Ah, of course," I replied, taking a deep breath before hollering "John!" up the stairs.
"What?" John shouted back.
"Can you please bring down my wallet? It's in one of the boots in my wardrobe!" I yelled, well aware that I would now have to change its hiding place to prevent anybody who could hear my proclamation from stealing its contents. I plastered what I hoped was a reassuring smile over my face and said to the homeless man, "Thank you sir, if you could please join the back of the line, your money will be here shortly."
"You haven't asked if I've got any information."
"Well, have you?"
"No."
"Well, then, why would I?"
The man sniffed again, turned on his heel and trudged to the end of the queue.
The woman now at the front of the queue was wearing an outfit composed mostly of bin bags which exposed her left arm, bruised with needle sticks. I could tell from the way she'd put her hair up, different to normal, that she had something to tell me but that it wasn't what I'd asked to know.
"What information to you have for me?" I asked
"Well, it's not strictly what you wanted to know but there's a bloke who calls himself Septimus who gives out heroin. For free. It's probably laced."
"I'm sorry," I reply, "I already knew that but thank you anyway.
She nodded and joined the back of the line.
The next man looked more promising; I'd never seen him before so he'd obviously been told what I needed to know by one of his acquaintances who wouldn't have told him about him about me unless he thought there was money in it, therefore this man must have something genuinely useful to share with me. I could tell he was German from the way he'd cut his fingernails and I could tell he'd recently been masturbating or giving another man a hard on because there was residue of his sperm under them. Five seconds.
"Hello." I said to him, "Do you have anything of any interest for me?"
The man shifted from foot to foot, occasionally glancing shiftily up at me from beneath heavily lidded eyes.
"Yes?" I said, losing patience.
"I," The man began, "There is money in this for me, yes?"
"Yes."
"I know this person you spoke of. They sell alcohol to many people. Very much alcohol, very cheap. They meet in different places every time and with different people; there is always a sign. Maybe a piece of clothing, maybe something other like a piercing or a hairpin…" He shrugged, "They have one base but I don't know where that is. They call themselves the Moonblood Cult."
"Right. Thank you very much. Please go to the back of the line and wait to receive your payment."
I had drawn up a map of London in my brain and deduced that there were thirteen possible premises big enough to hold copious amounts of alcohol and generally unknown enough to stay hidden from the authorities and me. I heard John coming down the stairs behind me and turned around to take my wallet from him. Our hands touched as I did so and shivered involuntarily as a chill fission of excitement shot through my veins like cocaine at the feeling of John's skin beneath my fingertips. I sought for John's eyes in the half-darkness but he thrust the wallet at me and reddened, his eyes sliding to look at the frayed carpet.
None of the other homeless had anything of any significance to tell me so I dished out the money to them all, twenty-five pounds to each, plus fifteen to the heroin addict for what I already knew and forty to the German man for what I didn't.