Title: If Walls Could Talk
By: angstytimelord
Pairing: gen
Fandom: Doctor Who
Rating: PG-13
Table: VRD challenge - Brown, 5_prompts
Prompt: Torn wallpaper in abandoned house
Disclaimer: This is entirely a product of my own imagination, and I make no profit from it. I do not own the lovely Tenth Doctor, unfortunately. Please do not sue.

***

The Doctor looked around him, sighing and closing his eyes. He hadn't expected to find this much emptiness here, but he should have known that he was walking into a scene of devastation as soon as he'd received the message on the psychic paper.

He didn't know who sent that message, and he'd been cautious about coming here. But the readouts on the Tardis had told him that there was no sign of life on this planet, even though she could have been wrong. Still, he was convinced that this time, his ship hadn't made a mistake.

There was no living being here. Only the shells that humans had at one time inhabited.

All of Earth couldn't be like this. He wouldn't let it be. It wasn't possible for anyone, even the Cybermen, the Daleks, or the Master -- or whoever could have done this -- to devastate an entire planet with such ferocity that there was nothing left.

What could have done this? His first thought was the Vashta Nerada, but this wasn't how they worked. They would have left bodies, bones, something to show that they had been here. But there was nothing. No sense of life, of anything having existed at any time.

Maybe this place hadn't been devastated. Maybe the humans who had been here had simply .... left. They could easily have gone to another place; they didn't have to be gone forever. It was always possible that they hadn't been killed, that they still existed somewhere.

But even as the thought crossed the Doctor's mind, he knew that it wasn't true. The people in this town had been vaporized, vanishing as though they had never been here. Along with all that they had called their own -- their possessions, all traces of who they had been.

How was he going to piece together any information about the people who had obviously been lost here? There was nothing to guide him, nothing to tell him anything about who they had been. There was no way that he could find that information, not in this town.

Where could he start? The Doctor had never felt so frustrated in his life; he felt as though he'd been handed a puzzle and told that he had to solve it, only to find that it required a key and that he had no way of finding that one simple element that would unlock the puzzle for him.

This was something that the Master would do, of course; lead him to this kind of a puzzle and keep the key to solving it hidden from him, dangling it in the distance, tantalizing him until he thought that he would go utterly mad from running in circles.

Yes, if this had the signature of any of his enemies that he was familiar with, it was the Master. But then again, it might not be him; there could be someone new trying to tease him, and using the inhabitants of this town to bring himself to the Doctor's notice.

That wasn't very probable, though, was it? he asked himself, sighing as he looked around the room again. There was nothing here that could give him any sort of clue as to what might have caused this, nor one single personal belonging left behind in the dust.

No, there was nothing but the utter devastation of an entire town, a population that had apparently simply vanished into thin air, leaving not one trace of their existence behind. Things like this didn't happen out of the blue; there had to be an explanation for it.

An explanation that he couldn't find. It was maddening, to have this puzzle in front of him, but with so many intrinsic pieces missing that he would never be able to solve it. If only there was something to give him even the smallest clue ....

But there was nothing, no matter where he looked. This house would reveal nothing; there were only the empty rooms that had apparently looked on the scene of devastation but remained silent and could tell him nothing of what might have taken place here.

If only the peeling brown wallpaper could talk! The Doctor almost wanted to put his hand against that faded, once-bright paper, to smooth it out, to make the house look as though it was inhabited again and was simply waiting for its occupants to come back home.

What had happened here? What could have taken the people who lived here away so suddenly, without any sort of clue as to their disappearance? He would probably never know, the Doctor told himself, his shoulders slumping in defeat.

He could possibly spend all of his life wondering just what had happened here -- but he didn't think that he would. Whoever had sent that anonymous message on the psychic paper had wanted him to view this devastation, wanted him to see their handiwork firsthand.

Even though it had some of the earmarks of the Master's work, he didn't think it was. The renegade Time Lord would have left an unmistakable stamp on the scene -- and he would have left some sort of obvious clue as to where the Doctor could find him next.

No, this was someone far more insidious. And therefore, far more dangerous.

More dangerous than the Master? He almost wanted to laugh at that thought, but he couldn't. The idea that there could be any being in the universe that could possibly put the world he knew in more peril than the Master was able to was the most frightening thought he'd ever had.

Turning away from the torn wallpaper in the empty room, the Doctor moved toward the front door of the house. He'd seen enough here. It was time to see if he could glean some clues from the rest of the town, and make some attempt at getting to the bottom of this mystery.

***