Sherlock Swerve
Surprise Time Travel
Sherlock has completed his hunt of Moriarty's network and returns to John...but he missed one. John has only a moment to recognize him in the restaurant before a red spot mars his forehead and Sherlock is splattered with brain matter. Mary screams.
Five (?) years earlier, John gasps awake in his bed and a) the soothing sound of a violin soon picks up, or b) the gun he kept under the pillow in his old bedsit clicks between his fingers. Or c) the sound of an alarm through tent walls in Kandahar jerks him awake.
Whichever way, he's fucked.
Sherlock & Sally AU
Sally didn't meet Sherlock first on a crime scene. Sally wasn't even a cop when they met - she was at Uni for social work, he was there for...something in the sciences that no one seemed real sure of the details for. They weren't friends, though they passed each other every so often in the libraries or at parties.
Then Sherlock watched from an alley mouth, smoking, while Sally beat up her blind date for being a chauvinist waste of life and told her she was all wrong for social services. That her ten year plan for becoming a child psychologist was completely unsuited to someone clearly meant to be on the front lines, preventing damage, rather than cleaning up the aftermath.
A week later Sally switched her major to criminal psych. Sherlock's black eye healed. Suddenly they were meeting semi-regularly to smoke in the park, or on a street corner, or put some chemical mix that Sherlock promised only smelled lethal into some pig's dorm snacks.
They still weren't friends, but they were something. It just made Sally all the more bitter when Sherlock dropped off the map and into a coke den after graduation. When they met years later with Lestrade looking on, Sherlock pretended not to recognize her and Sally dubbed him 'Freak' and that was that.
Until they got kidnapped. By the fucking mob.