My first writing of Sally Donovan, and she seems to fit the "Missed" theme that my plot bunnies are hopping towards in the first chapters of this drabbles collection. I hope I do her justice.

What Sally Missed

Genre: General

Pairings: Greg and Molly, background

Main characters: Sally Donovan, background Sherlock and Greg

Sally Donovan was missing someone.

Ever since Sherlock Holmes, aka The Freak, had had his even freakier sister return from the secret compartment in his mind palace that was reserved for hiding things best left forgotten, he had been different.

Ever since the revelation of his childhood best friend, and the affirmation of his rock solid bond of brotherly friendship with John Watson – himself subjected to trial in deep waters – Sherlock had changed.

He was more… human.

Sally missed The Freak.

She no longer suspected him of nefarious and frankly dodgy behavior at crime scenes. Now he was just… there. Doing what he did, doing it well, and moving on. She was beginning to not mind him so much, beginning to trust him.

Or at the very least, not mistrust him.

He was still making his deductions, interfering, being a general purpose pain in the ass git, probably contaminating crime scenes… but something was missing.

The Freak was missing.

Sherlock Holmes was too… benign.

She wanted him to set her instincts on edge, to put her internal alarms on high alert. He had kept her on her toes, kept her on her game. He had reminded her why those instincts had brought her as far as they had thus far in her career with NSY.

Greg Lestrade wasn't much help. Her superior had seemed blinded by desperate trust from the moment he had started to invite Sherlock Holmes to crime scenes, but now it only seemed that Greg had, in fact, been right all along.

And that meant that she had been wrong, and it galled her, made her question herself. Made her second guess the instincts she had relied upon without a single shred of self-doubt.

Then The Freak had done something truly Freakish, to her mind. He had rejected a good woman that even Sally could see he loved with all of what heart he might have to speak of, and sent her in a beeline in Greg's direction. Sally couldn't imagine giving up that sort of happiness in favour of someone else. And now Greg and Molly were not only married, but expecting, and Sally wondered even more how anyone in their right bloody mind could give something like that up so completely, without seeming to so much as blink an eye about it. And not only that, but appear to be smugly satisfied, even ecstatically happy about it. About his own missed bloody opportunity.

It only made The Freak become more obscure, and Sherlock become more human.

Freaks didn't sacrifice. Freaks were cold, selfish. Utterly unfeeling. Freaks didn't give a flying rat shit about anyone but themselves.

It was off-putting.

She wanted to mistrust him again, wanted her suspicions to be realized.

Instead, she found herself doing the unthinkable.

She found herself actually liking him. Wanting to invite him to the pub for a pint like she would any other work mate. She wanted to get to know him, wanted to trust him the way Lestrade did, so unconditionally.

Greg had told her once many years ago, when she was first under his command, that the moment she became so jaded, so cynical that she lost her humanity, then that was the moment she needed to seriously think about changing her career path, because robots made bloody shit coppers.

Greg trusted Sherlock, liked him, was even close friends with him. Sherlock had interrupted his own life for two years in part because a gun for hire had Greg, along with two others, in his crosshairs at Jim Moriarty's orders, and only The Freak taking a swan dive - however faked it turned out to be - off of the roof of St. Bart's was enough to make those hired guns lower their muzzles, remove their clips, put their sniper rifles back in their cases, without having fired a single round.

Lestrade clearly had some kind of spidey sense going on that Sally was still missing.

Or maybe, just maybe, Sally Donovan wasn't missing it anymore.