Promptober 2025 Day 25: Footsteps in the Dark

Using thepromptfoundry‘s Ominous October list.

Ira Carpenter is mine. Warren Caldwell is @asininestars‘s Chicago Spirit OC. Pure fluff. I’m inflicting you with the unspeakable wholesomeness that is Warren/Ira.

+++

Ira tugs Warren by the hand down the shortcut he’s found, their footsteps echoing off the brick walls of the alley. Warren casts a look around them, because Ira seems blase about this but Warren’s learned from experience to be wary of dark streets like this. “Are you sure about this?”

Ira’s grin glints in the shadows. “It’s fine! It’s short. You’ll see in a second.”

Warren squeezes that hand in his, just to feel its cherished warmth and weight better. It’s impossible not to catch a bit of that contagious optimism. He smiles back.

And sure enough, this time Ira’s assurances come through. The alley opens up, and they’re across the street from Humboldt Park.

Warren stops for a second, struck by how the branches and brush are limned in silver from the moon’s light.

Warren’s pause knocks Ira off balance and he turns back to look, kicking out a leg to keep his balance. Warren can see the light dancing in his eyes as he takes in Warren’s face. “I know, right?” He grins again and it looks a little dopey with fondness. Warren’s heart hurts. But just before he reaches out to grab, to pull that beloved face close, Ira tugs again. “But wait, just wait. We aren’t there yet. It’s worth it!”

And so Warren follows him, helpless with love, across the street and into the moon-veiled walking paths, even though the shadows it casts are inky voids where anything could be hiding. Ira squeezes back when Warren tightens his grip on his hand. How can the man be so fearless when he’s been through just as much as Warren? Warren’s never sure whether it’s courage or fecklessness, but the thought of convincing him to change is like a knife in his chest.

But again, this time, it pays off. It’s not more than a hundred meters or so before the park’s lagoon opens before them, down a little slope of tall grasses, late flowers and cattails at the water’s edge.

Ira pulls Warren close to wrap an arm around his shoulders and lifts a finger to his lips.

Warren widens his eyes at him in silent question. Are they hiding? But the crinkle he can see at the corners of Ira’s eyes is entirely playful.

They stand there at the edge, between the trees and the meadow and the water. The moon shimmers silver on the tiny ripples of the nearly-still lake. The breeze is too faint to do more than rustle the tips of the leaves and the grass. It’s pretty, and Ira is warm. Warren slips an arm around his waist and tucks tight against him.

After a moment, something blinks.

And then, a second later, another.

Wide-eyed, Warren watches as the fireflies come back out of hiding. In small groups and then waves, they blink into a sea of tiny golden sparkles as though the night sky has descended to earth around them.

It’s so beautiful he thinks he might cry.

For a little while—a long while?—all he can do is turn in place. In every direction, they’re standing in a bowl of the sky, ribbons of silver and spills of black shadow filled with tiny, flitting stars.

Eventually he manages to find his way back to himself through the wonder, and grabs Ira tight. “I love you so much,” he whispers, right in Ira’s ear so he won’t scare their little fairy companions.

He feels Ira’s laugh against him. “You deserve beautiful things,” he whispers back, and tucks a lock of Warren’s hair back behind his ear.

Warren shakes his head, because he can’t conceive of deserving something this beautiful but he’s too selfish to give it back, and resorts to kissing his gratitude into Ira.

#chicagoSpirit #fluff #gayRomance #iraCarpenter #lgbt #mlm #myFiction #myOriginalFiction #promptober #promptober2025 #romance #warrenCaldwell

Promptober 2025 Day 20: Claw Marks

Using thepromptfoundry’s Ominous October list.

Slip is a Chicago Spirit OC who belongs to diristine and clefrot. David is mine, some kind of god/horror/thing who belongs to Ira’s crew.

CWs for drowning, choking, mind/body/something-control, mindfuck, suicidal ideation, hubris

***

Slip realizes he might be in over his head about the time the claws start sinking through the back of his neck into his hindbrain.

David’s grip is crushing—David? his frantic brain flits to, who names a nightmare god ‘David?’—and Slip feels his whole body losing its ability to coordinate itself under the pressure. His knees buckle, dropping him slowly to the floor.

Oh. He might die here, actually.

“After all, Filip,” David’s voice murmurs, “isn’t that the real reason your lungs fill with water when you work magic?” Slip hears that like it’s coming from his own chest, echoing through his bones. “Wasn’t there a moment when the water poured into you, when you felt it pouring into your men, and you were so very much one with them? Hovering with them in the liminal moment between life and death?”

Slip’s breath hitches in his chest. No.

But. But yes. The memory comes back to him, the swirling blue-white at the surface of the water as he sank into the depths. The vibration of the water as they tried to shout for help, with no air to shout into. The sensation of it sweeping down into his lungs, the sensation of the water not just surrounding him but becoming him. He’d become it, as his consciousness had diffused into that world, and he’d flooded into them, and they’d gone down together—

His magic stirs. He stirs it, or the claws puncturing his mind do, and he can’t tell the difference. The water begins to pour into his lungs, and it tastes like life and death, and when he tries to cough it out, it shoves upward, into his sinuses, and then back down, leaving him choking and gasping for air like he had that night, like they all had even as he’d coveted every space inside them.

“Didn’t it feel so terrifying, so good? You were like a god in that moment. ” Slip’s body reverberates like he’d spoken the words himself around this growing column of water that’s fucking his trachea. He moans and it dribbles from his nose. “The moment you seek again now out of fear and hubris, each time your magic begins to pour through you.”

He claws at his own throat. He can’t breathe. He doesn’t want to, if it means he has to let the magic go. It’s running wild now, and he can’t tell if he’s calling it or if David is, somehow, but he can feel the tides seething through him, he can feel the Moon, is it even possible to die when he’s not a human body at all, he’s a force, a substance, thrumming invisible in the air and plunging into these lungs—

His lungs convulse, grabbing desperately for any tiny gulps of air he can, and informs him very clearly that yes, he absolutely can.

#bodyHorror #chicagoSpirit #choking #drowning #eldritchHorror #horror #hubris #mindfuck #monsterfuck #myFanfiction #myFiction #nsfw #objectPenetration #suicidalIdeation

Promptober 2025 Day 14: Grave Dirt

Using thepromptfoundry’s Ominous October list.

Agatha’s second story! I’m honestly really proud of this one. Agatha is my OC for krakaheimr‘s Chicago Spirit setting. But honestly this story has very little to do with that. This is historical fiction about an NB person dealing with their baggage.

CW for passing reference to past underage sex work. Agatha is from the early 1900s and she’s had it rough.

+++

The soil of Flanders Fields seems to seethe beneath Agatha’s feet as she walks through the poppies and graves of Ypres.

She had thought she would never come back here again. Never wanted to. The earth of the continent where she was born is a mass grave, and one of the things buried here is the person she should have been.

But then that’s why she had to come back, isn’t it? She couldn’t run forever; she’s not that kind of coward. No, cowardice has little to do with it. You spend years running from the pain and then one day, you look into the mirror and you understand it’s either time to turn and fight or to allow the past to take control of you.

And that is exactly why she left the first time. She is her own. She has paid far too much to achieve that. She will allow no one else to control her; not even her own memories.

She’s worn a funeral suit to this place, as befits a man visiting his own grave. Her trousered legs brush and hiss through the poppies and with each step those memories well up from the blood-soaked earth that bore witness: of how she slowly shed her humanity like the soldiers here shed their lives. Drip by drip. When she stopped being a girl, and became a woman. A man. A spy. A prostitute. A liar. A killer. A traitor. A disembodied knife in the dark. A monster.

And there, finally, she finds peace. She’s proud of her monstrosity. It feels like the truth. She wouldn’t choose to go back.

The men who ran the German war effort, who used her as a tool in her tender adolescence and turned her into a whore and spy and assassin for the Fatherland…they’ve walked on this soil. These very poppy fields contain, somewhere, the imprints of their squalid feet. Perhaps if she finds them, she can drive some iron nails through them. It’s a long shot, but she pocketed some before she came here, just on the off chance.

She has her knives too, on the chance she should meet any of them in person.

#agatha #chicagoSpirit #genderFluidCharacter #historicalFiction #lgbt #myFanfiction #myFiction #myOriginalFiction #nonbinaryCharacter #promptober #promptober2025 #transCharacter #worldWarI

More of Ira and the SCP spinoff Chicago Spirit setting by Krakaheimr!

There’s a location in the setting called the Shepherd’s Crook, which is a little pocket dimension the gang was gifted and that one of their branches operates out of. Kraik said it’s an odd place to be in, so I wanted to play with a few thoughts about what that might be like.

***
You might think a pocket dimension undiscoverable by the cops would be the perfect place for a bunch of criminals to shack up. Better than coming and going, even, since the more in-and-out people do, the more likely they are to be discovered. But a few days in and Ira is beginning to realize why nobody else seems to live in the Crook.

He noticed the first day how things seemed to swim a little if he moved his head too fast, or took a corner too suddenly. As creepy pocket dimension side-effects go, that one was pretty harmless, even when he began to realize that when that happened, things looked a little…purple and twilit around the edges till they stabilized.

And then there was the thing where…well, the thing was, he kept getting lost. Couldn’t take a proper turn if it killed him, seemed like—and it almost did a few times, when he wandered into the middle of places he wasn’t supposed to be.

And that was weird, because while he didn’t have the best sense of direction, it was pretty average at least. Normally a guy got used to the feel of how a place twisted and turned after a few days. But it was maybe four or five days in when he left his room and headed left down the hall to that first intersection, and realized the reason he could never figure out which way to go was because the hallways kept changing direction. Not that you’d end up someplace different if you turned right. But that the hallway that went right kept changing angles.

He sat down on the floor at the corner there and watched it for a while.

Eventually Perch came and found him. Ira heard the step-tunk of his stride coming up the hall a bit before he came into view. And then he stopped and looked down at Ira. “The fuck you doing down there?”

The twisted-up confusion was such a normal expression on the face of a guy like him that Ira snorted a laugh. “Did you know the hallways move?”

Because sure enough, sit and watch long enough and you realized this turn in the hallway went right the way a river flowed south. That was, ultimately that was the direction the water moved in. But on any given turn you might be facing south or east or west—or even north for a bit on a real exciting loop—and furthermore sometimes the river jumped its bed and laid a new path.

Perch shot him a warier look at that. And then, he answered Ira’s question by shooting another over his shoulder, back the way he’d come. “Well come on. The Ol’ Man’s been wondering where the hell you got off to. Sent me to make sure you didn’t fall into a pit somewhere.”

“There are pits?”

Ira wouldn’t be surprised if there are pits. He hasn’t found any yet, but that doesn’t necessarily mean much.

You don’t see the hallways move, is the thing. There’s no sun in here, or stars. The Crook is just rooms and hallways, with their tobacco-stained whitewashed walls and cheap, battered wood flooring with rugs here and there thrown down to hide disturbing stains, and every once in a while a movie poster or something plastered to the wall, either because somebody got bored of the plainness or maybe to help them remember where the fuck they were in this place.

It’s impossible to see the place shift because they’re inside it, and there’s nothing to reference for bearings except the hallway itself. But pay close attention and sit still for a while, and you can *feel* the way you’re slowly being turned to face a different direction.

So yeah, he wouldn’t be surprised if the pits just haven’t found him yet.

But then there’s the day he takes a wrong turn—UGH—trying to come back from the kitchen and catches a hallway waking up.

He rounds the corner, and…for a second he thinks there isn’t a hallway there. But then, with a jerk like a cat startled awake, it opens up. There’s a split second that registers in his eyes like an after-image, spots floating in his eyes in the shape of streaks of raw universe weaving themselves, and then the scuffed white walls and battered floor are snapping into place, with a painting of some guys playing poker in hell, and an unattributable air of sheepishness.

He turns around and goes back.

https://www.prettyarbitrary.org/2023/10/09/ira-chicago-spirit-the-shepherds-crook/

#chicagoSpirit #fanfiction #iraCarpenter #myFanfic #originalCharacters #originalFiction #scpFoundation