Instinct is a funny thing.
I didn't mean to reach out to him. I was staring at him, gaze transfixed, when I felt my arm rise. My hand stretched out to him, yearning to touch him, pull him to safety. I tried to put all my thoughts into the action. All the things I had felt but, stupidly, never said. How much I cared for him, how much I loved him. Things better said in life than in death, all expressed in one outreached hand.
His hand reached out to me, and I knew he understood.
"Sherlock!" His name ripped from my throat of its own volition. I had been thinking it of course, along with a flurry of other rushed thoughts. And as my desperation grew, his name burst free. The phone sat uselessly by my ear as I called out to him. In vain, I yelled his name. As if that one word could stop the inevitable fate of Sherlock Holmes.
It didn't.