Takeshi Watanabe settled into the grass under a tree to watch the gathering crowds in the park. Rose sat beside him, trying to gauge the emotion behind his stoic facade. She wondered, alternately, about the best way to initiate a conversation and whether she should even try. And so they sat, side by side, watching as benumbed survivors accumulated around them. The Doctor paused by Rose's elbow just long enough to thrust a testing finger into the air.
"The time-distortion is thick enough to cut with a knife here," he said, before wandering off to explore the park.
Once he had left, Takeshi spoke up. "What is it, this 'time corridor' your Doctor is looking for?"
"Your guess is as good as mine," Rose said with a shrug. Then thought better of it. "Actually my guess might be a bit better than yours..."
"I would guess a time-corridor is a thing that is used somehow for traveling to a different time."
"Right. Okay," Rose said. "So your guess really is as good as mine."
"And the blue box," Takeshi continued, "this is also for traveling to different times? You and your Doctor, you have come from the future I perceive."
"Yeah," Rose said.
"Did you know of this ...?" he waved a hand to encompass everything around them. "You knew this would happen today?"
"Yeah," Rose admitted. "I mean no, we didn't know it was today ... I mean, we didn't know when we got here.... See, I think the Doctor doesn't always manage to steer the TARDIS -- his time-machine, I mean -- as well as he pretends to. Half of the time we don't know where, when, we end up. So yeah, we knew, historically, that this happened ... but we didn't know it was happening here, now, while we were here. Does that make sense?"
Takeshi sat in brooding silence for a bit before speaking again. "You could change what happened, could you not?"
"I don't know," said Rose. "The Doctor, he does seem to get involved wherever he goes. I think he can't help himself, he just tries to fix things wherever he goes. And yet... I don't know. I almost destroyed everything by trying to save my own father's life. I think some things, somehow, can't be changed."
"We call them 'fixed points,'" the Doctor said from behind them. "And Hiroshima, August 5, 1945, is one of them." He squatted beside Takeshi. "Hundreds of people have tried, hundreds of times, to change what happened here today. I've tried myself, more than once. I am truly sorry." He put a hand on Takeshi's shoulder. Takeshi bowed his head and appeared to be fighting back tears.
The Doctor stood up. "Right," he said. "Work to be done. You wait here." And he strode off across the park.
Takeshi and Rose sat for some time in awkward silence. Eventually Rose spoke up: "The Doctor really does a lot of good, you know. Even if he can't change ... all this," she waved a hand at their surroundings, "he ... he's a good man."
Takeshi said nothing, but pulled a small chess set from his jacket pocket and began setting it up. He moved a few pieces, playing both sides of the board without much enthusiasm. Rose, having run out of encouragements to offer, watched in silence. Neither of them saw the man approach until he stood directly above Takeshi's chessboard.
The man looked ... not quite right, somehow, but not in any way they could put a finger to. His eyes seemed wrong, devoid of life. His movements were a little too deliberate, too precise, as he lowered himself to sit at the chessboard and move a black pawn.
"Play," he said to Takeshi. And Takeshi played. The game was intense. Neither man spoke, all focus was on the board. Rose soon lost interest and went to find the Doctor.
She discovered him standing by the river, watching people wading into the water. Wading in, and not coming out.
"They're going in to die," the Doctor said to her. "They're drowning themselves. Do you notice what's wrong here?"
Rose looked. She studied the scene intently. Aside from the obvious, abject despair of a population trudging so numbly to its death ... "Where are the bodies?" The Doctor nodded. That was the right question, though she still wasn't quite sure what it meant.
"Where's Takeshi?" he asked suddenly. He looked back, then took off running toward where the old man and the odd man continued their game.
Takeshi was decidedly uncomfortable about this strange adversary. For all his intensity he seemed dispassionate about the progress of the game. Even as Takeshi stood poised to force mate in the next four moves, the other hardly blinked. At the last moment he switched his move. A weak feint with a pawn, which left his rook exposed, just to see how the other would react. He didn't; he took the rook without comment.
Then the Doctor was there, nudging Takeshi aside to take his place for the rest of the game. The Doctor recovered easily and pushed boldly into mate in two. The stranger looked up, raised his hand, and touched his fingertips to the Doctor's temples. The fingertips shone suddenly with a bright light. The Doctor cried out briefly, then went silent. The stranger hauled the Doctor's limp body over one shoulder and carried it off toward the river.
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