#askinfresh

But the real question is….who would Pocketcat be? 😂 maybe Gaster? I could see that fitting. Pocketcat being a very mysterious and strangely meta character that knows a little too much about what’s going on at all times, and has taken on several different masks/faces at this point seems to work well with Gaster’s lost in the code and scattered across space in time narrative.

i have so many things to say about pocketcat and all of them including me shaking him back and forth like a maraca.

"I'd love to know what goes on in your fucked up lil brain"

Poppy is a snacc but so is her bro, call that a snacc pacc 😎 🔥 ❣️

Red blushed at the way Pap was looking at him, fidgeting in the new clothes, wings fluttering.

“Awwww thank you!”

In typical me fashion, I took this too far, so this chapter has also been published on my Ao3.  

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Aziraphale blinks, a frown knitting his brow.  “Terribly sorry, dear girl, but I must have misheard.  They want you to do what?”

Crowley shrugs her velvet-clad, bead-encrusted shoulders.  “Seduce some lordling or another.  All part of the grand plan, apparently.”  Her tone is deeply contemptuous, and Aziraphale knows she wasn’t consulted on said grand plan.

“Surely… surely your side has done enough?  Divorcing poor Catherine and breaking from the church?”

“Apparently not,” she says. “You didn’t hear it from me, but we have a lot planned for Henry’s next five wives.  This little temptation is just a cog in the machine.”

“But…”  Aziraphale trails off.  Standing motionless on a stage of Tudor opulence, ladies gliding about on their men’s arms like autumn leaves on the wind, he feels suddenly wrong-footed.  “You don’t actually have to, ah…”

He lifts his goblet for a drink, throat scraped dry.  Crowley wrinkles her nose.  “Eurgh. No.  I’m just going to bat my lashes and keep my bodice laced tightly.” She lifts her arms, flexes her wrists. “This era’s got too many layers, if you ask me.  I can hardly keep track of them all.”

Aziraphale thinks, given Crowley’s current assignment, that an excess of layers may not be so awful. He takes another swig of wine, mouth twisting.  Utter swill.

“Well, I’m off,” Crowley sighs, striding into the melee.  Aziraphale watches her go, preoccupied by the sway of her hips, nauseous in a way no angel needs be.

“Who is that?”

A whispered sneer. The angel turns.  A pair of noblemen watch as Crowley insinuates herself among the dancers.  They smirk over their goblets, eyes catlike and keen.    

“The Lady Crowley,” one murmurs.  “New on the scene.  Causing quite a stir among the Boleyns.”

A considering grunt.  “She is… singular, isn’t she?”

Aziraphale sets his teeth. In the crowd, one dancer yelps as a muscle spasm grips his leg.

“Indeed,” says the other. “What are those peculiar spectacles? Have you ever seen their like?”

“I admit, the lady’s spectacles are not the first thing I noticed.”

The noblemen snicker over their goblets.  Aziraphale grips the stem of his own, divine wrath turning the wine to frothing blood.

“Truly?” the other asks. “She’s a hag!”

“With the right amount of wine,” the nobleman murmurs, “any woman becomes beddable.”

The last strands mooring Aziraphale’s temper break.  He snaps his fingers.  The noblemen startle, then shriek as the wine in their cups churns, wriggles, erupts into maggots, burgeoning and boiling into starving existence.  Their fleshy grey bodies wriggle out of the goblets to land on hands, tumble into billowing sleeves, their thousand thousand mouths working, tireless and insatiable.  The noblemen howl and flail about, knocking into those too slow to give them a wide berth.

“Really, Aziraphale,” Crowley says later, preoccupied with loosening the ties of her bodice, “I didn’t know you had it in you.  Maggots.  Thought for a second I might’ve slipped up.”

Aziraphale grunts and takes a swig of his newly-miracled wine.  It’s heady, blood-red and honey-sweet.  It tastes of triumph.  He keeps his expression carefully neutral.

Crowley removes her headdress and sets it aside, the scarlet veil fluttering.  “As far as thwarting me goes, it wasn’t your best work.”

“Well,” Aziraphale says, “perhaps I got a little… overzealous.”

“I’ll say.”  Crowley perches on the arm of Aziraphale’s oak-wrought chair.  “Why maggots, though?”

Aziraphale clears his throat and takes another sip of wine.  “Oh… you know.  Trying to… to bring a few lost souls back to the church, I suppose.”

“Blimey.  That’s biblical-level recruitment, right there. And what did those two nobles do to deserve it?”