#but josh and sam would smack that shit on your head like they’re toddlers with play dough <3< /div> Explore tagged Tumblr posts

[celestialsolstice]

personally? i think danny would love helping you dye your hair.

he would be SO meticulous about it, properly sectioning out your hair—whining about how you gave him hair ties to do it with rather than actual clips like the professionals—using the fun little brushes!!

meanwhile you’re sitting in a chair that you two moved into your bathroom and watch him go to town on your head through the mirror, trying not to whine too much at him about how much faster this would be if he just used his gloved hands to massage the dye into your hair.

but he’s adamant on doing it the best way possible for his girl, because if he ruined your hair (he literally could never, and you wouldn’t get mad at him anyways since you’ve done WORSE to your own head), he would actually cry and probably beg for forgiveness

[queenofbaws]

Who ya gonna call? - 17

Chapter: 17/17 Chapter title: Epilogue – Call anyone else. For the love of God, call ANYONE else! Fic rating: T - Language, general spookiness Summary: Sam and the rest of the CREEPs sign off...for now. Author’s note: And so the story comes to an end...or does it? ;P Previous ---

“It’s going, right?”

“Do you see the waveforms on the screen?”

“Wavefo—”

“The…the spikey lines, Ash. The ones right in front of your face.”

“Oh! Those! Yeah, I—”

“That means it’s going. Jesus Christ. This isn’t rocket science.”

“Well excuse me! I’m still just not used to—”

“You know guys, as much as I love the playful banter thing, the longer we sit here gabbing, the more Chris has to edit out later, sooo…”

“Hey! Yeah! Finally, someone appreciates my time and—”

“Okay, SHUT UP!” Surprising a grand total of no one, Josh smacked a hand against the table, the sudden noise succeeding in getting them to go quiet…as well as creating a massive spike in the recording. (Sam could see Chris grimace just looking at it.) Leaning in a bit closer to the mic, Josh shot them all a warning glare before going into the familiar opening spiel. “Well hello friends and fans! It’s that time again—time to…”

“Grab your bay-ghouls and scream-cheese,” Chris interrupted, grinning like a fool at the chorus of groans he got from the rest of them. “Who the hell needs brunch when you’ve got us here to serve up your breakfast-time dose of spooky shit?”

“We’re cutting all of that out, y’know,” Ashley said, trying to sigh but mostly just giggling.

He held up a finger to shush her, raising his eyebrows as he spoke into his mic. “This is the Creepy Crepes Podcast, and no, we’re not cutting any of that out.”

Sam shook her head. “And so the true horror begins.”

“Yeah, the horror of Chris thinking he’s funny.”

“Now that,” he interrupted again, “That is definitely getting cut out.”

Josh clucked his tongue like a beleaguered babysitter dealing with toddlers. “Well, while the peanut gallery flaps their yaps, I’d like to take a sec to say we’re all honored and humbled to present you with our fifth—yeah, you heard that right, fifth—episode. Sammy, tell ‘em how honored and humbled we are.”

“Super honored,” she said, pulling her microphone just a bit closer as she settled more comfortably into her chair. “Super humbled.”

“A woman of many words…” Chris snickered. “But for real, I’m proud of us! Really! You ever think we’d make it a whole five eps?”

“No,” Sam and Ashley said at once, meeting each other’s eyes over the table and laughing.

“Wow. Nice.”

“I was totally sure you guys would get bored after like…two, and we’d have to suffer through another cooking blog debacle.”

“It wasn’t a debacle, Ash.”

“You started multiple grease fires, Chris.”

“Yeah well…clearly you and I have different definitions of ‘debacle.’”

“Clearly.”

That time, it was Sam who took it upon herself to get them back on track. Well…relatively speaking, at least. “Okay, okay, your obvious culinary shortcomings aside—”

“I have no shortcomings,” Josh deadpanned.

“Madam, you’ve gone too far this time!”

“All of that aside!” she repeated, raising her voice so she could be heard over them, her words full of laughter. “I seem to remember you guys saying you had a, uh, super special story you wanted to cover for this…let’s say ‘momentous’ occasion.”

Across the way, she saw Chris frown, turning to glance between Josh and Ash. “Story?” he asked, “No one mentioned any story to me…”

“Why would we?” Ashley joked, squinching up her nose before playfully sticking her tongue out in his direction. “Josh made us promise we wouldn’t say—”

“Oh God, here it comes…”

“—because you’re gonna be the one doing most of the narration.”

“Wh—I don’ even get to do a character voice?”

“Absolutely not.”

“Fuck you, man! My voices are—”

“Awful, Cochise. They’re…” Josh shook his head, “They’re just awful.”

“Better than yours,” he grumbled under his breath.

“I’m gonna pretend I didn’t hear that. For the sake of our continued friendship.”

Yeah. They were about as on-track as they would ever be. Sam pulled her legs up onto her seat, neatly tucking them under herself so she could sit criss-cross. “See, when I hear that this is a strictly Washington-Brown endeavor, that’s when I get nervous.”

“As you should.”

“That’s fair!”

She couldn’t help grinning at their stupid, smiling faces. There’d been a moment there after they’d gotten back from the lodge where a part of her had feared her time with the CREEPs was nearing its end.

Not because of anything she’d done, of course, but uh…well…Ash had come away from Blackwood needing two stitches on her face, splints for three fingers, and a considerable stretch of doctor-ordered bed rest. Josh had come away with a black eye, a couple bruised ribs, and a hairline fracture in his coccyx (a diagnosis Chris had belly-laughed over for like four days straight). As it turned out, getting possessed…and being thrown around by someone who was possessed…wasn’t exactly the safest of pastimes.

Or covered by most insurance plans.

She’d seen it so clearly in her head: She’d gone through all those emotions, all those bizarre ups and downs and trials and tribulations for nothing. She’d stepped wildly out of her comfort zone (with a hell of a nudge from Beth and/or Hannah, to be fair), she’d found a group of people who she liked and who liked her, she’d gotten attached to them, and just like that…Blackwood Pines was going to take them away just like it had done before. Josh and Ash would never speak to each other again, she knew it! How could they? After everything that had happened that night, after their injuries? There was no way. There was just no way. The group was going to crash and burn and she’d be alone again.

Only…as it turned out, that’s not what happened. Like. At all. If anything, the night’s festivities had seemed to solidify Josh and Ashley’s friendship, and honestly? Sam wasn’t about to ask.

God, horror nerds were so fucking weird.

So they’d walked away from the mountain in one piece (more or less) and the biggest challenge they’d been forced to contend with had been convincing Josh’s parents that ‘No, really, the lodge was like that when we got there.��

Well, okay, that and Chris’s disappointment over their shared bet.

Apparently they’d never come up with a contingency plan for what would happen if the whole group discovered undeniable proof of the supernatural at the same time, so after a grueling debate—a debate Sam had been made moderator of, much to her chagrin—it was decided everything cancelled out. The three of them had to pay their own student loans, same as before.

Chris had pouted for days.

“So spill it, what’s the story?”

Josh cleared his throat in an attempt to sound haughty. “I’m so glad you’ve asked, Samantha. Today, for your listening pleasure, we have one of my personal all-time fave creepypastas.”

“…uh…” Sam glanced around the table and saw absolutely no help being offered to her. “I-I’m sorry, did you just say creepypas—”

“Ooh! Ooh! Is it Jeff the Killer?!”

“No Cochise, you fucking degenerate, it’s not Jeff the Killer.”

A small gasp full of childlike glee. “Slenderman?!”

Ashley reached over to the setup on the table, clicking a switch in one deft movement. “All right. Chris’s mic has been officially muted, so—hey!” She tried to push him away from her own mic to no avail.

“Hang on! Will someone explain to me what a friggin’ creepypasta is?!” She knew the instant it was out of her mouth that she’d committed some sort of sin, the other three collapsing into the same groans Chris’s jokes usually got.

Josh clutched a hand over his heart, face screwed up in agony. “Sammy, please!”

“You’re killing him! Quick Sam, take it back, take it baaack!”

Finally managing to shove Chris away from her microphone (using both hands, no less), Ashley rolled her eyes. “Basically they’re short horror stories that get circulated around the internet. Sort of like…well, if you want to get into the history of them—”

“We don’t,” Josh said, mouth a little too close to his mic.

“—you can look at like, those old chain emails that would go around sometimes, and—”

“No one wants the history, Ash.”

“—they sort of evolved out of that tradition of—”

Click!

“Aaand you can all thank me later, but now we have both Chris and Ash muted!” Josh took a moment to pretend to bow to their audience before turning to Sam. “Internet horror stories. Done.” He glanced to Chris and Ash as they turned their mics back on. “Done! Wasn’t that easy? See how simple shit can be?”

“Internet horror stories, huh?” Sam raised her eyebrows and caught Ashley’s attention. “You’re a writer, Ash—you ever written a…” She didn’t get to finish.

Ashley snorted so hard that Sam’s sinuses hurt. “Oh. Oh God no,” she laughed. “I have standards, thanks.”

“Uh…”

“Josh is more the creepypasta guy. I’d never write a creepypasta. But I’ve definitely tried my hand at a nosleep or two…”

“Oh come on.”

Sam slumped her shoulders. “For the love of…okay, obviously I’m missing something. Or like…a lot of things, much more likely, so…what’s a nosleep, exactly?”

Josh groaned, “It’s the same. Fucking. Thing!”

“No it’s not!” Ashley argued, leaning forward in her seat. “The quality varies so much between them—”

“Every single fucking nosleep is the same, so don’t you come at me with that bullshit about quality—”

“Creepypastas are all like ‘One day I turned on an old copy of Cooking Mama I found at a garage sale and all her recipes used human body parts as ingredients! And also her eyes were hyper-realistic and bleeding!’”

“Yeah, and every nosleep starts out ‘Sorry guys, I’m not a writer, but I’ll try my best,’ and then they make me read six thousand words of mostly adverbs and the word ‘crimson’ with my own two goddamn hyper-realistic, bleeding eyes, so I rest my fucking case.”

As they went back and forth through what sounded like a very, very old argument, Sam watched Chris gesture to both of them, twirling his finger near his ear. That was great for a podcast. Really helpful for the audience.

“What about you?” Sam asked him. “You got a horse in this particular race?”

“What, me?” Chris shook his head, “Oh no. Oh nononono. Just between us?” He acted as though he was going to tell her secret despite them all being recorded. Holding a hand up to his mouth, he stage-whispered, “I’m more of a, uh…SCP guy, myself.”

That, apparently, was the magic word needed to unite Josh and Ashley. “Shut up!”

For being a quote-unquote short horror story, it took them a fair amount of time to read through. More than anything else, Sam thought it was a miracle they’d gotten that far at all, what with Chris’s meandering narration and Ash doing everything in her power to make Josh break whatever godawful voice he’d decided to slip into each time a new character was introduced. Had she been enjoying the story? Eh, not really, but she had been enjoying listening to them be idiots, so when it happened, she was laughing. At first.

They were almost done when it happened, too. That was the thing—they were so close to being done when her phone started to ring.

Chris was the first to look up, scoffing in the terrible approximation of Edgar’s accent he’d insisted on using while reading. One would think that, given how often he used it, that stuffy, posh affectation might’ve improved. It had not. Honestly, it might’ve gotten worse. “Whose bloody phone is that? Hu-hu-hubuh, I say, this is rather—”

But Sam only vaguely heard him. She turned her head to the side table where, lo and behold, the screen of her phone had lit up. It rang and rang, the playful marimba of her ringtone abhorrently shrill.

“—you uh…okay there Sam? We can cut this out, I was just joking about being—”

She pulled her headphones off and set them on the table, getting up to grab her phone. “I…ha. I could’ve sworn I put this on vibrate…” The instant she saw the caller ID, she felt the color run out of her face.

“…Sam?”

Without saying a word, she laid her phone flat on the table where they could see it. It kept ringing.

And ringing.

And ringing.

And the name on the ID read ‘Unknown.’

“O-oh,” Josh stammered, an uncharacteristic tremor in his voice. “Well that’s…mmm.”

Subtly as he could, Chris scooted a few inches away from Ashley…who promptly smacked his arm for not being subtle enough. They stared and stared, and the phone just. Kept. Ringing.

“You could just—”

“What, ignore it? Yeah, how’d that work out last time, genius?”

Before she could think herself out of it (before the others could talk her out of it), Sam hit the accept and speakerphone buttons in rapid succession.

The four of them acted as one, recoiling from the phone as though it were a poisonous insect, listening to the dead air buzz on the other end.

Sam swallowed hard, her fingers white-knuckled as she gripped onto the edge of the table with one hand and Josh’s wrist with the other. “…hello?” she said, speaking in a low, apprehensive whisper.

Silence.

Then, “Hello. This is an automated call reminding you that the warranty on your—”

“Oh my God.”

Like ragdolls, they sagged with obvious relief, collapsing into the manic laughter of the terrified. Headphones came off, the recording was paused, and for a long moment they just exhaled.

After their, um…odd night in the Pines, they’d bailed at first light. No sanatorium, no return trip to apologize to crazy old Jack Fiddler for doubting him, no nothing. They’d run as fast and as far as they could, and even once they’d returned safe and sound at CREEP HQ, they hadn’t done more talking about the situation than had been entirely necessary.

Obviously they weren’t as over it as they were pretending they were.

Oho, they were…going to have to talk about that eventually. Later. When not taping a shitty horror podcast, maybe.

“Okay, I don’t know about you guys, but uh, I think I’m ready for a break.” Sam flashed a tense smile at them before standing, tossing her phone back onto the side table after hanging up on the robotic voice. “Like, a serious break.”

“Hear hear,” Josh agreed. He slouched deeper into the couch cushions, raking his fingers through his hair. “Jesus Christ,” she heard him say as she headed for the kitchen, “Almost popped a gasket, there…”

Sam sighed and felt the last of her adrenaline fizzle out with the breath. She swung into the kitchen and found herself smiling. There, on the dented door of the fridge, someone had rearranged the bright alphabet magnets to read ‘HI SAM,’ the rest of the letters surrounding the message in a lumpy-bumping shape she thought was probably supposed to be the CREEPs’ ghost logo. Or an amoeba. One or the other. “Cute,” she muttered, letting herself hope it was a sign the guys had finally—finally!—had the decency to start stocking snacks she could eat.

“Anyone want a drink?” she called over her shoulder towards the other room. “You’ve got, like, every kind of soda under the sun, uh…Red Bull, Monster, some…oh, red Gatorade, um, water, duh…” She waited to see whether anyone would answer, and when no one did, she continued under her breath, “Barbecue sauce, mayo, pickles, a little ketchup…”

From the next room, she heard not an answer, but some sort of commotion (the kind that involved voices being raised), so she grabbed the first soda she saw and shut the fridge again.

“So is that a no on the barbecue sauce?” she asked, walking into the main room and leaning against the wall as she took a drink.

Again, no answer to her question, but Ash whipped around in her seat the moment Sam reappeared. “Can you talk some sense into him, please?!”

Her eyes followed where Ash was pointing. Josh grinned his usual wide, toothy grin. “Him?” Sam asked, raising her eyebrows. “I mean, I could try, but…”

“We agreed the next segment would be called ‘The Garbage Tapes.’” Per the usual, Ashley kept talking. “The part where we rag on crappy horror movies.”

Sam took a sip of her soda and waited for what she was sure would turn out to be an especially stupid ‘but.’

“We didn’t agree on ‘The Garbage Tapes,’” Josh drawled, “I told you from the fucking get-go that I wanted it to be ‘The Carnage Tapes.’”

She grimaced. “Oh, eugh. I’m with Ash on this.”

“Thank you!”

Josh looked up at her as though she’d stabbed him directly between the ribs. “Oh come the fuck on…carnage makes more sense than garbage!”

“How?! The whole point is we’re trash-talking them!”

“No, the whole point is we’re tearing them apart!”

Oh, there was no describing the dread that filled her when she saw Chris raise his hand like a good little schoolboy. “I would like to propose a compromise.” He waited until they turned to him. “How about the best of both worlds? We call it…‘The Garnage Tapes!’” He spread his arms out wide, wiggling his fingers the whole time.

There was a beat, two, three, where she saw Ash and Josh exchange inscrutable glances. Then Josh shrugged.

“I don’t hate it…” Ashley admitted.

Chris did a celebratory shoulder-dance, complete with more unnecessary finger wiggling.

“What’s the first flick we’re putting on the chopping block?” Sam asked, stretching her calves out as she leaned on the wall. “Anything I’ve seen?”

“Guess that depends, Sammy…you seen Blood Monastery?”

Blood Mona…wait. “You’re gonna insult your dad’s movies?! Like, on a podcast anyone could listen to?”

“Um…duh? They’re awful.”

Sam looked towards Ashley, but she only shrugged. “I mean…they are,” she nodded, “They’re like, really, really bad.”

She shook her head, laughing harder than she should’ve. “You guys are heartless.”

“That’s us! No hearts, no souls, super cute butts, though…”

“Uh huh.” Sam tapped a fingernail on the can’s pop tab, marking out the rhythm to a crappy song the radio had been playing lately. “Cute butts miiight be a stretch…but whoever’s butt left that message on the fridge is at least, I dunno, cute-adjacent.”

“Um, was that supposed to be an actual sentence?”

“Wait. What message?” Josh immediately glared Ash’s way. “You messing with the fridge magnets, Hemingway?”

“Please.”

Rolling her eyes, she set her can down for the sole purpose of being able to judgmentally fold her arms across her chest. “Har-de-har. I thought we agreed we were done with the paranormal pranks and stuff, guys.”

“Sam, I don’t know what to tell you. The fridge has said ‘DO THE BARTMAN’ for the whole two fuckin’ years we’ve lived here—oh, except that time last April where Cochise replaced the B with an F—”

Chris leaned closer to Ash, pretending to whisper, “Some of my finest work, if I do say so myself…”

“—so unless the super cute message you’re talking about is telling us to do the hottest dance craze of the early 90’s, then I’ve got no Earthly idea what you mean.”

Yeah.

Right.

Okay.

She definitely believed him.

Sam heaved a dramatic sigh before turning on her heel, waving him to join her. “You’re gonna tell me,” she began, giving him a jokingly stern glare as he met her in the kitchen’s doorway, “That none of you wrote ‘HI SAM’ there on the…” She’d held her arm out towards the fridge to gesture at its door, but…

But…

There was no message written on the fridge. There was no ‘HI SAM,’ there was no ‘DO THE BARTMAN,’ there wasn’t even Chris’s oh-so-genius remix of ‘DO THE FARTMAN,’ no. There was nothing written there. Because there were no alphabet magnets on the fridge.

She and Josh turned to look at one another just as the power to the whole apartment flickered, buzzed, shut off completely, hurtling them into perfect darkness. From the next room over, they heard Chris and Ash shout in surprise, followed by a dull thump of someone falling onto the floor.

“Oh come on…”

“Lotta shit plugged in tonight,” Josh said, though he didn’t sound like he believed what he was saying. “Probably just blew a fuse or some shit. It’s fine, it’ll—”

The lights flickered on. And there, on the fridge, were the magnets, now arranged in the shape of a simple smiley face.

For a beat, they didn’t say anything. Not a single word. The two of them just stared at the cartoonish grin cobbled together by so many rainbow-colored letters, trying to absorb precisely what it was that they were seeing.

Josh didn’t turn to her, but he did lift his hand, aiming a tired finger-gun in her direction. “I won’t tell Tweedledee and Tweedledum out there if you don’t.”

Sam slowly turned to look at him, her eyebrows high with disbelief.

This was what she got for meeting people on the internet.