Warnings: Character Study, Introspection, Dark!Fic, First Person POV
A/N: Written for who_contest's Prompt: Fine. This was another one that just struck me out of the blue (as I was fixing dinner, of all things). I wasn't really sure what to make of it all, until I sat down to write, but it came out pretty much as I envisioned it (which surprises no one more than I). I can only hope it is readable, as I know first person is not everyone's cuppa. I didn't plan on THAT, it was just how it came about - and I've learned to not fuss overly much at the Musie's passing whims. This can be read in any Doctor's "voice", (though it felt Eleventy to me), but it would likely be closer to Twelve or Eleven than any other. Title-tweaking suggestion was by the lovely lost_spook (many thanks, m'dear - it reads much better now), but any and all other oopsies were left in by me out of sheer usual, this fic is mostly unbeta'd and written in one go, so please forgive any mistakes and/or blatant vagueness. And (as always), I apologize for any repetition, misspellings, sentence fails, grammatical oh-noes and general horridness. Unbeta'd fic is overly-thinky/wandery/blithery and unbeta'd.
Disclaimer(s): I do not own the scrumptious Doctor or his lovely companions. That honor goes to the BBC and (for now) the fantastic S. Moffat. The only thing that belongs to me is this fiction - and I am making no profit. Only playing about!

You could call it sand, but it wasn't.

It looked like sand, felt like talcum powder; and when it fell through your fingers, it almost floated to the ground. Not all of it though. Some of it smeared into the tips of your fingers, the web-like skin between them. So, so fine and barely there against your skin.

The air was still: no sounds, smells or sights to be seen. Just miles and miles of powdery sand that wasn't sand – shifting with the winds under the baleful eyes of three waning moons. No rocks or trees or rivers or lakes. Just this powder that sifted into your boots, clung to the lining of your clothes.

Ke'elitanor. The world had been known as Ke'elitanor.

Now it was known as nothing.

River would have been horrified, but that wasn't really a thought you wanted to cling to. Not with this sandy-powder that was once a world smeared into your clothes, caked into the cracks of the heels of your boots. The silence of this dead world made it worse.

The scream of the Timeline was hardly an after-thought.

There had been ten billion people on this planet. Ten billion. A staggering thought, really. Ten billion people, billions more animals and plants and trees and bugs and technology and buildings and memories and dreams to come.

You feel the scatter of them through your fingers (was it a child? a mother? a brother?), disgusted to handle them this way, but (helplessly) you try to reach out nonetheless. They fall like sand through your fingers. They feel like softness and light. But the light is gone and the softness hides horrors beneath.

Memories grit beneath your heels, but you are too breathless with sorrow to apologize. They can't hear you, they don't know of you. You came too late – but this time, it is no laughing matter. It's not a mere slip of the Ship. You are standing upon brutality so devastating, it echoes with the hollow potential of all that could have been.

A mere planet. In a solar system that had several. In a galaxy that had millions. There are others, there are always others.

But this one? This one was important, too.

You stand, the binary suns playing a dawning light across the obliterated world. The gray nothing that stretches before you holds clues and you intend to follow them. You don't know what you'll do when you come to the end, only that someone has to speak for those who were given no chance to do so. Someone has to dismantle the machine that could cause such destruction – and you know that (at least), you can do.

There will be no speeches this time. There might be mercy. But there will always be pain. Pain that sifts quiet and bitter-sweet through the gaps of your soul, like the sand-powder that flows over a dead landscape that thrives no more. It would always be there. Nothing could stop that.

But you could stop the ones who brought Nothingness.

You see the tracks in the distance and you turn to trace them: their winding path disappearing over the awakening horizon. They may go on forever for all you know. But you have something the people on the other end do not –

Time.