A/N: I've been watching Classic Who lately, and I realized that I shipped The Doctor and Turlough. Then my angsty brain decided that the best way to deal with a new ship was to write an angsty fic for it. So: angsty fic, here we go.
Turlough watched the Doctor fly the TARDIS. He liked doing that, watching the Doctor. Every once in a while, the Doctor would glance up and give Turlough a smile. The Doctor was always so happy...
Would he be quite so happy if he knew what Turlough had to do? Well, Turlough was going to fail in his task, but the Doctor would find out anyway. The Doctor had a way of doing that.
Turlough didn't want the Doctor to die, much less to kill him personally.
Maybe there was another way...
But there would never be a happy ending.
Turlough never got happy endings.
And now the Doctor knew. At least Turlough didn't have to keep trying to kill him now.
So why was he so upset? Why? It didn't make sense.
The Doctor still acted the same way towards him, things were no different.
Except...
Except Turlough knew how betrayed the Doctor must feel. Turlough understood betrayal.
He felt like he'd somehow screwed something up. He hadn't, in fact maybe he'd finally done something right for once.
There still wasn't a happy ending.
It was after Tegan left that Turlough realized.
He loved the Doctor.
The Doctor was the most important person in the universe to him, the one man Turlough would die for.
And the one person who would never love him back.
The Doctor couldn't: He'd lost too many people. Nyssa, Tegan, and probably several others Turlough hadn't heard about.
The Doctor would never accept Turlough's love. He would consider it improper. It would complicate things between them.
And things were complicated enough between them as it was.
Turlough sat alone in the TARDIS. The Doctor had gone off, saying something about fixing the screwdriver and left Turlough in the console room to take care of the Controls. Not that they needed taking care of. They were just drifting.
Turlough was fighting tears. It felt like he fought tears every other day, but this felt different.
He cried for something that would never happen.
"You will never love me, Doctor. And I don't know if I can bear it."
A/N: And that's the end of it. Please tell me if I've gone out of character. My migraine-fogged-brain isn't very good at noticing such things.