Chapter Text
Well, I got distracted by Real Life Things while I was writing this, but at last, I have finished. I hope you have enjoyed this story.
Thank you to all of you who have commented. Every notification was a reminder to keep writing and not leave this incomplete.
Inspiration
Aziraphale and Crowley (and by extension, Shadwell and Tracey) play such a minor role in the climax of Good Omens. The Them inspire Adam to embrace his humanity, and also defeat the Horsemen of the Apocalypse. Anathema and Newt stop the nukes from going off. Crowley “takes care” of a jeep of soldiers, and Aziraphale shows up just to deliver a little bit of world-saving pedantry. But what if one of those pieces hadn’t fallen into place just in time?
Thus the first of my two main sources of inspiration for this fic was Freedom’s Just Another Word For Nothing Left to Lose, the venerable SGA classic about grief. In fact, the plot of P&F was originally intended to hew much closer to Freedom. I meant for the survivor to lose himself completely in his role, standing both within and apart from the Kingdom forevermore, serving as a source of fascination (and perhaps corruption) to a few curious angels.
However I couldn’t stomach writing a sad ending or a story where both Crowley and Aziraphale were actually dead. Alternatives like “faked his death” or “hiding in Australia” or “in prison” didn’t feel sufficiently meaty for the sort of moping I wanted, so I landed on possession as the method of hiding that one of them had actually survived. From there, I took a lot of inspiration from Harrow the Ninth, a trippy necromantic story in the second person... also about grief.
“Accumulating stuff sentimentally” was chosen as the survivor’s coping mechanism because I thought it was a nice, twisted echo to Aziraphale’s canonical tendencies to acquire rare books. Also, I’m incredibly nostalgic about “stuff” and I find it difficult to let go of old things that don’t fit my current life, so this story was also a fun and low-stakes way for me to explore those feelings.
Then, I thought the bell-book-candle trio from canon might be a fun idea for the denouement. But I didn’t really figure out the plot until I started trying to think of a pithy title for the story. I wanted something in the form of ___ in an angel/principality/etc to serve as a possession pun, and picked Prelude and Fugue while cleaning out my old music history notes. From there, the Bach connection grew and grew, and then took over the fic.
And then I wrote a Bach songfic
I structured the story to model Bach’s Prelude and Fugue in E minor, BWV 855, from Book 1 of The Well-Tempered Clavier (WTC). Bach wrote this set of preludes and fugues to show off the new tunings of (at the time) modern keyboards, which permitted pieces to be played in all keys without sounding “off.” The Prelude and Fugue in E minor is particularly special because it’s the only piece in the WTC featuring a fugue in two voices. Two voices! You know where we’re going with this...
(Please forgive any errors below, it’s been years since I studied music history.)
Chapter 1 - Prelude: Recitativo
Chapter 2 - Prelude: Cantilena
Chapter 3 - Prelude: Ornamentation
Chapter 4 - Prelude: Transposition
Anyway, the prelude starts off with a mournful little melody in the right hand playing over a rather sedate accompaniment in the left hand. The left-hand part is reminiscent of a recitative accompaniment that they play during the speech-like sections of an opera - a mildly repetitive bassline in unceasing sixteenth-notes, much like the Archivist’s initial work cleaning up the Kingdom. The right-hand part, however, is lyrical and cantilena-like in style, floating plaintively above the left-hand chords with abundant trills and other ornamentation, like Veggietale tapes and bootleg Bible misprints. Occasionally the piece also transposes itself into other keys, amongst them an Eastbourne charity shop and the Cliffs of Dover.
Chapter 5 - Prelude: Presto
Chapter 6 - Prelude: Descent
Chapter 7 - Prelude: Convergence
Chapter 8 - Prelude: Cadence.
Halfway through, the prelude picks up speed (presto, a rare tempo marking from Bach), at the same time that the Archivist’s search for apocrypha really takes off. The left hand accompaniment drags the right-hand’s formerly-lyrical melody down into a dark, obsessive frenzy, marked by binge-drinking and partial destruction of a perfectly good wooden door. The episode develops ominously as the left hand and the right hand play disturbing parallel octaves. Meanwhile, the Archivist increasingly loses track of time as his “occupant” rises to the surface with greater frequency. Ultimately, the left hand and the right hand parts converge and crash together in a cadence/television at the end of the prelude.
Chapter 9 - Silence
Typically, the prelude and the fugue are played back to back with only a second or two of pause in-between, at the performer’s discretion. I took the liberty of inserting a few scenes into this pause that I couldn’t fit anywhere else in the fic.
Chapter 10 - Fugue: Enunciation of the theme in the tonic key
Chapter 11 - Fugue: Modulation through Oxfordshire
Chapter 12 - Fugue: Theme in the key of Jasmine Cottage
Chapter 13 - Fugue : Modulation through alternative therapies
Chapter 14 - Fugue: Theme in the key of the Witchfinder Army
Chapter 15 - Fugue : Modulation through first person
Chapter 16 - Fugue: Theme in the key of A.Z. Fell and Co.
The Fugue in E-minor is a fugue in two voices. The fugue’s structure is very strict and regular: the main theme of the fugue is played in each hand sequentially, then both hands noodle around and modulate before playing the theme again - but in different keys! This is followed by more modulation, the theme again, and so on and so forth. There are exactly four episodes of modulation in the fugue following the initial enunciation of the fugue’s theme.
I, ah, bent its structure to my needs by giving the treble statements of the theme all the present-day scenes addressing different characters’ ideas of a “cure” for the Archivist and the bass statements all the flashback scenes addressing Aziraphale’s Bach fanaticism. The “modulation” chapters all entail somewhat less productive stretches of travel, yoga, and traumatic flashbacks while the Archivist transposes his millieux.
Chapter 17 - Fugue: Modulation en Unisono
I want to point out two unusual passages where both hands play the same keys (“en unisono”), separated by exactly two octaves. One occurs during the second modulatory episode (coinciding with Modulation through alternative therapies) and one occurs during the fourth (coinciding with Modulation en Unisono). Parallel passages like this are normally a big no-no in composition, because they sound “hollow” and are a bit lazy besides. Bach, being Bach, naturally knows how unusual these passages sound, and uses them to draw attention to the halfway point in the fugue and to the return to the tonic (“home”) key at the end of the fugue.
I tried to do something similar by lining up those two passages with the sequence where Aziraphale and Crowley are both manipulating the same ouija board, and then again where Aziraphale and Crowley have both acquired a degree of separation but are wielding the same sword (though this happens more in the beginning of Chapter 17 than the end of Chapter 16 because I wanted to end 16 with a cliffhanger).
Chapter 18 - Fugue: Recapitulation
The recapitulation is the final statement of the theme, always in the home key. In this fic, it also represents the answer to the overarching question of the Archivist’s cure (i.e. impromptu bell-book-candle).
Chapter 19 - Fugue: Coda
The coda is the “tail” of a piece of music that brings a piece to its conclusion, much like an epilogue. In the Fugue in E Minor, the Coda begins immediately after the final full statement of the theme in the treble. The bass begins to state the theme one last time, and I’ve lined it up with the explanation of why Aziraphale and Crowley both enjoyed Bach, despite the latter’s historic reticence (Also, one shouldn’t try to learn Bach fugues by playing it with another person like a duet. Just go slow, play each melodyline separately and in different combinations, and then ramp up with more voices and more speed.)
The bass’s final statement of the theme is not complete though, and segues directly into a bit of ornamental noodling in the treble. In the fic, this coincides with a transition from past to present via the peals of laughter/bells, followed by literal echoes of the Bach situation through the tape player.
Anyway, I’m never ever ever writing another songfic based on a fugue. Trying to echo its structure in this much detail was very difficult. If I ever write classical music songfic again I don’t think I’d break it down passage by passage again. I think I’d just stick with, I don’t know, a rondo.
Jesus: Omniscient?
Okay, I had a lot of trouble with this one. Terry Pratchett is an atheist, Neil Gaiman has Jewish heritage with Scientology connections, and Good Omens is vaguely based on Christian theology. I went with the Christian view of Jesus for this fic because I didn’t want to touch Scientology, and because Judaism attributes little particular importance to Jesus.
In Christian theology, Jesus is simultaneously both human and divine, technically omniscient yet occasionally surprised and uncertain in the text. I am not a particularly religious person so I don’t fully understand the nature of the hypostatic union, and it’d be weird to ring up my devout friends and be all “can you tell me about your Lord and Saviour so I can write a fanfic of a fanfic of your holy text?”
I’ve chosen in this fic to portray Carpenter as omniscient (from divinity), yet having some serious emotional reactions and second thoughts about the Plan’s execution after seeing it up close (second thoughts are very human, right?). It’s like how we might already know how The Life of Brian goes, but that doesn’t mean it’s not funny or comforting to rewatch. Or how we might know that eating lettuce is healthy, but that halfway through a head of lettuce one might say “fuck it” and start eating emotional support ice cream instead because eating the head of lettuce left a bad taste in their mouth, and really, there’s nothing inherently evil about either lettuce or ice cream.
Carpenter’s reluctance to take a more active hand in helping the Archivist thus serves two in-story purposes. Firstly, to get the Archivist to solve his problem by himself: if Carpenter waved his hand and solved the plot, our protagonists would not have developed the strength, persistence, and will required to survive and presumably reunite after the final chapter. Secondly, it created the opening that Carpenter needed to steer the Plan in a different direction.
The Bach Revival
Bach, though incredibly famous nowadays, fell into relative obscurity after his death in the 18th century. However, his extended family and many students did their best to disseminate his work, including Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach and Johann Philipp Kirnberger. Kirnberger’s students included Bella Salomon, whose grandson was Felix Mendelssohn. Mendelssohn received a copy of Bach’s St. Matthew Passion from Bella for his fifteenth birthday, and subsequently performed it five years later in 1829. This performance was received warmly, and brought Bach’s music back to public attention.
Do I like Bach?
No, not really. I screwed up the Prelude and Fugue No. 5 in D Major (BMV 850, WTC1) in an exam due to misleading muscle memory once, and I also like a bit more emotional oomph in my music.
Do I like The Da Vinci Code?
Yes, I read it when I was twelve and I unironically like it quite a bit.
Will I write more Good Omens fic?
Yep! I don’t plan to write a sequel to this fic (if I did it’d be called Sonatina Demonica) but I have some other ideas. The appeal of writing for the Good Omens fandom for me is getting to put our protagonists in all sorts of improbable historical situations and trying out different writing styles and ideas. On the list are fics set in the dark ages (first-person outsider narrator) or crusades (epistolary), but I’ll probably write the Babylon noir story first.