Horror
He awoke shivering, and knew from the way his muscles ached after every tremor that he had been shivering for some time. Awareness came slowly, with the pulse of his heart in his wrists, and with every added bit of consciousness he wished, more and more devoutly, that he had remained unconscious.
The floor was cool, and slick with grime. He could tell because he was naked, curled on his side and feeling the nervous sweat edge around his ribcage and down to the metal of the floor. The room was pitch-dark, and even with the uncanny glow of his eyes lighting along his cheekbones, he could see nothing but black edged in red. With a groan, he tried to find the strength to curl his arms beneath him and push upwards, away from the floor. It was then that he realized he was not quite naked. Thick metal rested heavy against his collarbones, and he reached a shaking hand up to examine it.
It was a collar, slick and much thicker than anything that would ever be put on a dog. The very front of it, where it rested over his voice box, had been fitted with an impressive D-ring, onto which a chain fastened securely. Nominally, this would not have been a problem, but fingertips long trained and long sensitized by years of thieving told him that there was more to this collar than simple restraint. Faint lines etched the surface where wires had been set, and there was a trio of lights that he couldn't see, under his chin, one of which was warm from activity. It was a collar designed to repress his genetic code.
Panic speared through him, and he lurched forward, trying to find his feet beneath him. He found, by merit of a rude jolt to the neck, that the chain that latched to his collar also bound him to the wall, and allowed him no greater movement upwards than to his hands and knees. He could crawl the perimeter of the room, it was so small, but he couldn't take his feet.
He'd been trained for times like these, when he'd been captured after a job and relieved of everything useful for escaping, but each and every moment had relied on his bio-kinetic power to snap his bonds. Now, only human and frighteningly vulnerable with no clothes and no weaponry, he could feel himself slipping to a more savage and feral fear, a long-repressed phobia shading forward. It was not the enclosed space that bothered him—he'd been in tighter places than this without a problem—but the chains, the restraint that horrified him. He was trapped, caught against his will, and had no way of knowing when he'd be free again.
Desperate, he traced trembling fingers along the edges of the floor seeking a seam that could be teased and worked at until it let him loose. There was no such seam, however, and if he quelled his panic long enough to close his eyes and feel the movement of the air, he could tell it was spilling in from above. The chain that kept him from reaching the top of the box was bolted into place, and without his power he could not even begin to hope to remove it, tear his fingers to shreds in attempt as he might.
He did not know what was worse; the simple fact of being caught, or all the gruesome scenarios his mind played out of what might happen to him, now that he was helpless, at the hands of whomever his captors were.
