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Sometimes they find their soulmates, or their calling, or their home.
Sometimes they die in agony, or have their memories ripped from their living minds.
Occasionally — very, very occasionally — he leaves them first.
But there’s one thing they all have in common, every single companion who makes their way into his hearts and into his TARDIS: they all end.
Can you stay? he wants to plead, each and every time he finds a fresh, hopeful bond of companionship blooming. Could you be the one who stays with me?
But deep down, he already knows the answer, and shudders, wondering how this one will end.
Sometimes, somehow, he fools himself into thinking that this time is different. This time, it will last.
Those, inevitably, are the times that the endings hurt the most.
He’d take a good old-fashioned temporal paradox any day, the Doctor thinks, over the cruel paradox of hope.