Disclaimer - I don't own Doctor Who. Unfortunately. If I did, well let's just say some of the possibilities in the Unbound stories would appear in the real show.
Authors note - I am trying to keep the writing of this story in line with Krasko's character. Hope you enjoy. Please leave a comment.
"She messed everything up."
Lip curling as the prison guards arrived with his food, his gaze narrowing and his disgust so palpable the guards would need to be blind to ignore it since one of the guards had skin as dark as polished walnut, Krasko stood up to the side of the prison cell like he was expected to do and he stood there with the sneer still emblazoned on his face as the guards entered the cell.
It was standard Stormcage practice for the guards to go in pairs as they went around the max security wing and gave their prisoners their meals so the inmates would realise trying to escape was a bad move. The second guard was standing back, just out of reach whereas the other guard was not, his hand dangerously close to his weapon. Krasko ground his teeth together as the… sub-human dropped the meal tray down on the desk and left without a look back, probably more than aware of how badly Krasko wanted to gut him alive simply for being there.
But he couldn't. The neural restrictor that had been surgically implanted in his head instantly reacted to his impulses and he had to grind his teeth as the implant inflicted him with pain in his head that made him feel like someone was crushing his skull.
The second guard noticed his expression and snorted. "You should know by now you can't kill us, Krasko," the guard said, his smile making his tone of sympathy fake.
Krasko turned to him, furious with the guard's statement. The neural restrictor increased its strength, and despite doing his best to hide it, he couldn't hide the gasp of pain that left his lips and he almost doubled up over as the pain hit him hard.
The guard with the dark skin, the one whom Krasko hated simply because of his skin colour, shook his head and snorted in disgust like his friend. "In pain, are we?" he mocked.
Krasko cursed the guard even more. He had been trying to think non-homicidal thoughts in order to lessen the pressure in his head caused by the restrictor, but the guard's mockery made his temper snap. Now the desire to kill which would have probably matched the sheer hatred only a Dalek was capable of was shooting through him, and all Krasko wanted was to tear the guard's head off.
The restrictor reacted quickly. Krasko's vision became blurred as the pain became virtually unbearable, and he almost collapsed. During his fugue, he dimly heard the guards get tired and just walked out. When they were gone he was finally able to push the homicidal thoughts away, but he was left with a splitting headache. That was normal - neural restrictors were designed to be "humane" but it was a total lie. In theory, they were supposed to rehabilitate the inmates unlucky enough to get them surgically driven into their brains. But where was the fun in them just receiving a light dose of pain that was geared for whatever crime the inmate had committed and then disappearing just as fast when the agony could last like a common migraine?
Krasko sat on his bunk as his food became progressively colder as he tried to master the pain. Once it was finally under control, he got up and walked over to the desk and lifted up the cover to see what he had. Hmm, he thought, it didn't look bad. Still, he took a deep sniff to see if there were any drugs mixed in with the food, but he found nothing and he lifted up his fork and slowly ate his meal. Krasko had learnt the prison staff and the guards were not above drugging their inmates, particularly the nastier ones like himself to keep them under control. Krasko remembered the first time he had been drugged. He had been incredibly sick for weeks, but he had gotten over it as he tried to take each day as it came so then he could get out of here.
He had been stuck in Stormcage for years now, each day starting the same, where he would be doing much the same things while being allowed to visit the gym, watch a movie at the cinema, play games like antigravity football or basketball, before being locked up again in this cell always under the guard of every guard here.
As he ate his meal, he thought back on those days he had been truly free, and the crime he had committed that got him locked up here. Krasko had murdered 2,000 people in one go, though he had murdered many more, many of them belonging to different creeds, races, species and colours.
Krasko hated them all - the nonhumans and the sub-humans like that guard. He was not stupid. Krasko knew he was a racist, a xenocist, who hated anyone different from white skinned humans or humanoids like himself, he felt comfortable with them. It was the alien things out there that he couldn't stand.
And he had murdered hundreds of them.
But during his long, murderous career Krasko had murdered many aliens as well as humans and humanoids of various origins, and he hadn't given a thought to them. No, he was proud of his crimes. The restrictor in his brain might make him stop killing, but as he thought about it, there was no force in the universe that would make him regret what he had done.
Krasko sighed and continued to eat his meal and when he was finished he pushed the tray away. It would be collected in the morning just after breakfast. Lying on the bed, Krasko lifted up the book he'd been reading before the guards arrived. Krasko was not a scholarly person, he knew that, but he had to admit to himself this book on Earth history was fascinating since it allowed him to mentally visit the past on a world that had, like many others, shaped the universe with the rise and the fall of various empires and federations that had come and gone over the centuries even if most of the content was boring thanks to the dry writing written by various historians who had visited the past with vortex manipulators.
He bypassed some of the earlier parts of history like the Battle of Hastings and the Battle of Waterloo, even if they were interesting - personally, he preferred World War One and Two. At least there everyone was fighting on a much larger level than the primitively small scales than before.
History had never really interested him. In fact it had been his worst subject at school, and he had barely managed to pass it (not that it mattered, since by that point he'd decided to become a murderer after discovering a love of it early one when he had killed that annoying dog his neighbour had loved), but truthfully the book helped him pass the time when he just wanted to be left alone, and get away from the other inmates, particularly those from lesser races.
Krasko had never understood what had made him so racist, but truthfully he didn't care. To him, it was a part of his being, and he didn't want to change that for anything, not even the galaxy -
Suddenly Krasko stood up as he read something in the book, something that made him stop reading. He flicked back and reread the passage again. He looked closely at the words printed on the page. There it was. In 1955 in the 20th century, before Earth humans left their planet and began exploring space, there was a simple protest on a bus in a part of the United States of America. Insignificant, if not for one thing.
The woman doing the protesting was black.
From what he'd read so far, given the historians who'd written this book had written it in such a way it was almost considered a religious event (something which made him feel physically ill to look at, never mind think about), people of different coloured skin (why couldn't the stupid authors just say what they were? He thought to himself in disgust at the political correctness that was displayed in the history book) were segregated, and they were not allowed to visit certain places, and if on one of their transportation services they had their own seats, but if someone superior arrived they were meant to give up their seats.
Krasko had approved of that, just like he had approved of the much earlier American Civil War (the irony of the whole situation of why the Union had started the war was not lost on him, nor was the outcome, following up all the way to the 1950s), but he almost reacted with anger when he saw the seventeen pages devoted to how one of those….. things refused to do as she was told, sparking a protest that eventually resulted in the Civil Rights Movement in the 20th century.
Rosa Parks.
Krasko could tell that although the big players like Martin Luther King had gotten what they wanted, Rosa Parks was the main player (bastard should have been lynched before he started, Krasko thought to himself, mentally thinking about it, and wincing when the neural restrictor reacted). Once the effects of the restrictor lessened, Krasko was able to concentrate once more. He flicked through the pages and re-read the history book around Rosa Parks again.
She was the reason why humans had those laws of equality, she was the inspiration behind all of the politically correct rules that humans and other governments out there allowed alien things to walk around mingling with real people, and allowing for interracial marriages and even the birth of mixed children! Okay, so he admitted he was blaming her for all of that since Rosa Parks was long since dead, and all of those laws allowing the mingling of human and humanoid and alien DNA were written by idiots.
Rosa Parks…. She messed everything up. Krasko could see it clearly, it was the clearest thing he had been able to see ever since he had been incarcerated in Stormcage. Krasko flicked through the book again until he reached the end, his heart no longer in reading the book and speeding time along so he could while away the boredom of being locked up in this place. When he reached the end of the book, Krasko went back to the beginning and began flicking through it again, but he read something that caught his eye.
Krasko had known the book had been compiled from historical references collected at the time, but the more accurate information came from visits to the past from time travelling historians who had gone back into history, retconning everyone they had interviewed who had either witnessed the event in question or had heard about it from others. The time travelling historians brought back facts that made the events seem more realistic than bland information printed in mass-produced books.
But Krasko wasn't interested in that. He was more interested in time travel. He was starting to see a way he could make things better, for people who thought much like he did, that aliens and different coloured people remained in their place, and didn't make things worse for those better than they were. It wasn't an impossible science, there were time travel technologies out there, but the most accessible piece of hardware he could use was a vortex manipulator.
Yes. He would find a vortex manipulator and he would travel back through time and deal with Rosa Parks -
Wait, no, he realised with a frustrated growl when he remembered what the bastards had surgically embedded inside his skull. The neural restrictor made it virtually impossible for him to kill anybody no matter how much he wanted to actually slice someone's throat, or put an Alpha Meson burst through their skulls. How would he dispose of Rosa Parks?
Groaning in frustration, Krasko sat on the bed and thought it through. He could easily find someone to kill her perhaps? But the moment the thought entered his mind, he dismissed it just as quickly. It was too risky. Even if he did find someone willing to do the job, he would never be able to tell him much about Rosa Park's future. Sure, he could tell them he was a time traveller, and use the manipulator to show the events that would happen, and lie to them that Rosa was the root cause, but what if they didn't go through with it? It was just too risky to rely on someone else, and besides, he had learnt a long time ago never to trust anyone. Krasko looked around the cell with annoyance, wishing not for the first time that there was some kind of computer with a wifi hookup that would let him do some proper research into the matter, and learn more about Rosa Parks in the meantime.
Krasko knew he had another four years in Stormcage left to go before he was free.
In the meantime, he would need to keep his head down and just get through what was left of his "rehabilitation" and then track down a vortex manipulator and discover a foolproof way of dealing with Rosa Parks. Krasko sneered at the thought of his rehab. The prison governor and his staff believed that by shoving a neural restrictor into the heads of their worst offending inmates, then if they experienced the blinding headaches induced by the blasted things then they would never kill again, so if they were ever removed it had become second nature. Krasko could understand and even appreciate the principle since it did work, but he had no intention of hanging around waiting for that to happen.
When he went to bed that night, Krasko began mentally counting down the days before he could go back and deal with Rosa Parks before she screwed everything up….
Until the next time..
