It was exactly a year since Sherlock had died, and John Watson once again found himself standing in front of his grave. He didn't know why, there was no point in talking to Sherlock's tombstone. He knew that Ella would have tutted if she had seen him here, he was supposed to be moving on, after all. But he couldn't let this day go unnoticed, he couldn't stop his feet from carrying him here, and he couldn't stop himself from feeling the pain of the giant hole Sherlock had left in his heart. His whole world had been wrapped around Sherlock from the moment he first met him, but he didn't realise that until he was already gone.
John sat down on the ground next to Sherlock's grave, and placed the single black rose in front of the tombstone. He leaned his elbows against his knees and rubbed his tired eyes. He was always tired nowadays, and not the kind of tired he used to be after Sherlock and him had stayed up all night solving a case. The sick, heartbroken kind of tired.
"I... I don't know what one would be expected to say in a situation like this. Perhaps a normal person would say nothing at all, a normal person would certainly not sit here and talk to an inanimate object. But I'm not normal, am I? You weren't normal either, that's probably why we worked so well together. Anyway, I'm rambling now... What I actually came here to say is - is that I love you," John's shoulders sagged as he buried his face in his hands, trying hard not to let the tears escape him, his face betray his emotions.
After John had collected himself, he knew he really should go, but he couldn't bring himself to do it quite yet. So he sat there, feeling the slight chill of the wind against his face, looking around at the graveyard that could have been quite beautiful, hadn't his friend been buried there. That was when he noticed the tree branch not far away from where he was sitting. Weird lines had been carved into it, some of them shorter and some of them longer, and they were gathered in groups of three or four, apart from a single, short line. They looked a bit like tally marks, except there were no diagonal lines. John found this very odd, but didn't think any more of it.
"I suppose I should get going, I can't sit here forever, no matter how much I wanted to," he said, and got up on stiff legs, leaning against his cane. He took a few steps forward and stroked the top of the tombstone, his fingers leaning against the cold marble. "Goodbye, Sherlock, my old friend." He pursed his lips together into a thin line and started walking away from the graveyard.
It was only when he was sitting in the cab on his way back to his apartment that he realised what the, as he first thought they were, tally marks meant. They weren't tally marks at all, but were in fact morse code.
"Could you turn around please? Turn around! I need to go back, I - I left something at the graveyard!" he said, sounding maybe a little bit too panicked, because the cabbie gave him a weird look through the rear-view mirror. He obliged, though, and turned the car around at the next crossing.
John hurried over the graveyard, anxious to get to the branch. He should have recognised the morse code straight away, after spending so many hours learning it during his military training. When he got to Sherlock's grave, though, the branch wasn't there anymore.
John let out a frustrated sigh, closing his eyes and whispered, "Come on John, focus now... The the average human memory on visual matters is only 62% accurate..." However much he focused, he couldn't remember all of the lines. "Short short long short, or was it short long short short? Then long long long... but what came after that?! I know it ended on just a short line, for sure," he muttered to himself. Once he decided to sit down and draw everything in the soil, however, it took him less than 30 seconds to figure out. Sherlock would have been proud.
John was still confused, but there was a slight flame of hope burning inside him now, hope that Sherlock might not be gone after all. He knew it was stupid to hope, but he just couldn't help himself. After he got up to leave for the second time that day, he noticed that he didn't have his walking cane with him.
He had left it in the cab.