For Gavii who asked for: Sensory Deprivation, no character was chosen.
He knew it had been a set-up from the start. Guards goaded into creating a situation so that he would react, and like the hotheaded idiot that he is that was exactly what he had done. How long had he been here now? He had quickly learnt that to create a scene was exactly what the guards wanted, the excuse for the beatings, the punishing water, the infliction of pain.
Yet he did it anyway.
Maybe he was tired of being submissive. Keep your head down, Scott. Maybe they will leave you alone today, Scott. Perhaps the questions will stop if you don't react, Scott. Well, the questions had stopped. But it didn't stop the attempts to get him to react. He was well aware that he was seen as some kind of competition, that to get him to react was kudos within the guard ranks.
Yet he reacted anyway.
He didn't remember who started the fight, but the feeling of the blood rushing was so good after so long. There was the echo of a different life, a different time in the surging of adrenaline, but that was so long ago now that he didn't remember what that different life was. Only that he had had one. The crunch of bones had been satisfying, even as a tendril of guilt wormed away inside him.
'Violence is never the answer, son.' A voice long lost and dead, yet still able to give him pause, and it was that pause that gave the guards their opportunity to bring him down. Tasers were crude but effective.
And now he was in The Tank.
He'd been here before. It was a small metal box and he only just fit inside. He really was taller than everyone else here. Inside was…black. Scott wasn't sure how the tank had been made, but there wasn't a single chink of light or breath of air in the place. His head touched the ceiling and his shoulders touched both walls. His knees were bent up so that he could hug them, and that was the sum total of how much room he had.
Scott didn't know what was worse, the complete darkness or the lack of sound. It was a complete sensory deprivation – the only sense he could use was touch, but when his body is touching every side of the box even that sense is pretty useless.
And he knew better than to talk, yell, scream for someone to let me out! That will only prolong the agony. And it is agony, not just physically. With no sound or light there is no way to see time passing, to know how long he is in here.
Oh. That's new, then. Apparently, being completely deprived of sight and sound is not enough to torment him anymore. Someone has taken to banging on the tank. The first time it happened, the sudden reverberating sound caused Scott to jump, banging his head and scraping his shoulders. The sound had hurt as much as the movement had.
Scott had counted, hoping that it would, somehow, give some way of measuring time, but it soon became clear that this was a random thing. Just another form of torture.
Centre yourself, Scott. Focus on breathing the stale air and imagine it's the island air. Pure, clean, salt-tinged air. See the palm trees, the jungle, the beach. Imagine being on one of your runs. Through the jungle, up the side of the volcano, around in a loop and back down to the villa where…
He can't help the small sob that tears from him.
And suddenly he's rocking slightly, clutching his arms around his knees, tears streaming. He hasn't thought about his brothers, his family for so long now, a self-defence mechanism that kicked in early.
But he needs to stop. Any sign of weakness and they will have won, will have a means to get to him, and through him they may get to them. So he metaphorically straightens his spine, wipes his eyes as best he can and forgets them. Forgets what they are, what he was.
Maybe, one day, someone will come and rescue him.