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His companions were always his friends. This was no news to anyone, really, just a constant fact in his travels all around the time and space. They saved his life countless times when they were off to adventures, killing (or not) the bad guys and saving the good ones, letting civilizations live and be free and watching beautiful sunsets in a planet so far away from their origin ones that they awe in surprise.
The Doctor loved this, the amaze on their faces and the happiness they inspired him. That was mostly why he took humans; they were so primitive in their technology and innocents about new and shinny things in the universe that he felt like a teacher, a professor. That always brought him delight.
But after ten regenerations he was tired and old. So very old. He even didn't know precisely his own age, it was always nine hundred-ish, but for all he knows, it could be one thousand or two thousand more than that. The TARDIS could make him a scanner and find out his age, excepting he doesn't want to know. He's afraid of it.
He doesn't want to know that he is an old man even for Time Lords standards (thankyouverymuch), nor he wants to know that he doesn't have many regenerations left. His time in this one was getting over and he could do nothing about it.
Also, he was getting tired of leaving his companions behind. Saying goodbye to each and every one of them (and some, he couldn't even say nothing) because they were leaving by their own, because he left them, because they had, because it was too dangerous for them to even remember him, because they couldn't handle it anymore, because⦠becauseā¦
The worst of all was when they die or gone away.
And when he thinks of them, those friends who he used to travel, his hearts breaks a little.
Now it was time for dying.
