Promptober 2026 Day 2: Cages / Confinement

Using Lauren’s Promptober list.

Chicago Spirit AU with bonus Carpenter sibling again. Featuring Wheels and Stephen Carpenter (my first time writing Stephen, Ira’s older brother), along with Ira and Piper, who don’t get any lines. Piper Elison belongs to mxsinistir over on Tumblr. Wheels belongs to krakaheimr on Tumblr.

Chicago Spirit is 1920s noir with eldritch horror. CWs for body horror, captivity, mutilation, drug use, torture, psychological torture

***

Stephen doesn’t notice the first few steps toward his brother and sister. The horror is possessing him like an evil spirit. It moves his feet without his say-so.

While Stephen stares, Wheels moves past him, circling around to face him with hands on their shoulders with all the pride of an artist basking in his masterwork.

“Enchanting, aren’t they?” he murmurs.

This all feels like an awful dream. It’d be easy to write this off, tell himself it’s just a hallucination. Wheels gave him something earlier, before he brought him down to his nightmare of a garden, and it has his head swimming. At the best of times, Wheels’ garden is an otherwordly haunt, with strange dim lighting and spookily beautiful shapes formed by his careful cultivation of the plants he grows in, you know, the flesh of living people.

With the haze and the dark fairyland of his surroundings, Stephen could just about convince himself that he can turn and walk out of here and it’ll all just be a hideous dream.

He can’t, though. Because the reason he’s here is the English folly Wheels has turned his siblings into.

“Yeah, a work of fucking art,” he mumbles.

The awful thing is, Wheels isn’t wrong. Ira and Piper are bound together by morning glory vines in a little bower formed by the drape of the plants. They look like one of those Romantic paintings about the manifestation of Spring in all its sensual innocence. Coiled about with lush green foliage, pink and blue morning glory blossoms spilling down over them, draping through Piper’s pink hair and Ira’s messy dark locks. They’ve been posed lounging together in a loose embrace, the picture of a tender, intimate moment between beautiful, fresh-faced siblings. But a closer look lets Stephen see how tight the vines twist together and knot around them, a living web that locks them so tightly in place that it’s all they can do to twitch their fingers. The plants curling charmingly around their faces also pin gags and blindfolds into place and take away their features, their speech…

It’s defiled. Dehumanized. Stephen can feel it from the inside. The three of them share a sort of bond it’s hard to explain: not psychic, but a bodily communion. He can feel them with the same interior, proprioceptive sense of his own limbs. Stand close enough and their bodies tingle together and merge, just a little, a casual kiss and blending of flesh to flesh, so familiar with each other that there’s no genuine boundary of all.

And so he can feel the plants’ invasion, as good as if they were inside him. The creep of them growing through the two of them, colonizing them inch by inch, stripping away their humanity and turning them into vessels.

It’s driving him crazy. It’s all he can do not to attack and rend with his bare hands. Just tear them out of Piper and Ira and set all three of them free.

It’d probably be phenomenal way to get all three of them killed. Only the possibility that it might lead to something worse than death keeps his feet pinned to the floor.

Wheels’ long fingers trace the vines that root them in place. How the hell he got the plants to grow this fast when they’ve only down here for less than a week…no, Stephen doesn’t think he wants to know. He wants to throw up, it looks so…final, so fatal. “You’ll find morning glories on tombstones sometimes. It represents impermanence there, or sometimes unrequited love.” His glaring green eyes are all on Stephen, soaking in his reactions, his terror, his grief. He must look pathetic right now.

He finds he doesn’t give a shit. Piper and Ira both shiver with the stroking of the vines, the sensations of the plants transmitted into their own bodies as nerves and roots delicately intertwine. It’s an automatic response for Stephen to reach out too, hungry to close that circuit and feel them directly instead of this horrible echo he keeps picking up.

A twisted little sob claws out of his throat when he feels their heartbeats beneath his hands. His legs collapse like the tension was the only thing keeping him upright, pouring his upper body in their laps. He’d pull the rest of himself in too and curl up there if there were room. They’re here. The three of them don’t share any kind of telepathy, but they’ve shared each other for enough years that it’s like regaining a limb. They’re part of him, breathing, living, their pulses throbbing in harmony with his, the rhythms of their bodies forming a chorus that’s the background noise of his life.

The plants wriggle through that familiar presence, rooted inside them with innocent, mindless hunger. And he can feel Wheels, the way they can feel Wheels. He’s sound, and scent, and the movement of air, a green fog with a voice that moves through space and brushes their leaves and gives them water. Their captor and their lifeline.

From the laps of his captive, mutilated brother and sister, he looks up at Wheels. An animal, the three of them, stripped of reason and resources, nothing but teeth and fear and desperation. It’s so much better than being alone. “It’s inside us,” he whispers. “You know that? What you put in them. It’s crawling through all three of us.”

Wheels likes that lots. It’s easy to see those bright green eyes darken with a gruesome kind of lust. “They should have thought of you,” he answers, an oily purr of paternal sympathy and gloating, “before they brought this on themselves.”

Piper and Ira make alarmed sounds of protest behind their gags. They want to reach for Stephen; they can’t do much more than twitch.

Wheels looks like he’s thinking hard about keeping all three of them here.

“You gave me morning glory seeds,” Stephen mumbles into Ira’s thigh. He tries his best to wrap his arms around them and give them hugs. Morning glory seeds are toxic, but also psychoactive. Hallucinogenic. They use them for prophetic trances in Mexico, he remembers. He’s never tried them–but they can’t feel like this, normally, can they? Like a hug, like someone is guarding him and holding his gate closed for him while he stumbles around drunk.

“Morning glory for resilience,” Wheels responds. He sounds proud. He looks proud–of himself, of them, as if they had any input into the decision. “Affection, and binding. These two,” he pets Piper’s pink hair, and then Ira’s, “are learning their lessons the hard way. I’ll release them once they do, but in the meantime, they can take comfort that the seeds they give birth to are watching over you.”

That’s… Stephen shudders, and curls tighter against them. Ira’s fingers twitch, rubbing back and forth against his forearm.

The worst part is, he likes it. It’s warm, and hazy, and nothing he’s ever taken has been as good for keeping his gate quiescent since they lost their dad. But this is the cost? This?

“This is my gift to you,” Wheels says to all three of them, and there’s something awful in his voice. Unctuous and sweet and a cold note of warning beneath that makes Stephen sick with fear for all of them. “I suggest you be appreciative, and not test my patience this time.”