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I can't believe I'm typing this, but... The Greatest Show on Earth is now complete. The epilogue is live on AO3. It introduces you to the final member of our quartet and kicks off a whole new adventure. I'd tell you it's less crazy than the story that preceded it, but who am I kidding: it's kinda crazier.

Speaking of a whole new adventure, I announced this in my a/n, but I'll voice it shrilly here, too. There is going to be a sequel to Greatest Show, a third installment in The Better Angels series. I'm not putting any timeline on the writing of it, let alone the posting of it, because in the immediate future I'll be returning to my original novel and I have no flipping idea what comes after that. But I love this series (can't you tell?) and I couldn't abandoned it if I tried. (I have tried!) So just know that a sequel is coming... some day. If you'd like to read said sequel, I recommend subscribing to my user profile on AO3, or hitting subscribe on the series page, a thing I didn't know you could do until today! AO3, always full of surprises. If you hit up either of those options, you'll get a notification when I start posting Zero Doors (working title).

You can also continue to follow me here for updates. I'll try to stay active, and my inbox will always be open. Consider me to be in a permanent state of AMA about these stories.

Thank you so very much for reading and supporting me over the years. It's a gift I can never repay.

When does Hannibal know? Does he sense it in the lovers? Does he smell it on Balbec? Maybe Hannibal has suspected all along. Balbec has always been so careful in arranging their assignations, in regimenting his time. But one afternoon Hannibal ‘forgets’ his portfolio at Balbec’s studio and returns to Galluzzo that evening to retrieve it.

Only to find Desmond Chirico-Jones’s Vespa parked in Balbec’s driveway.

Hannibal rolls right up to it. Leaves his bicycle standing beside it.

“Oh no, why would you—” Will follows him. “Don’t knock.”

Hannibal knocks. When no one answers, he climbs through a window.

“Oh, so we’re doing this,” sighs Will, before climbing through the window, too.

Inside they find exactly what Will knows they’ll find: Chirico-Jones sprawled naked on a wingback chair, with Balbec kneeling between his legs. Chirico-Jones sees Hannibal and yelps, pushing Balbec off him.

“Hannibal—Jesus!”

“Don’t let me interrupt,” says Hannibal.

Chirico-Jones flies out of the chair and wraps himself in a drop cloth. Balbec falls back on his haunches, looking up at Hannibal while wiping saliva from his chin. “Don’t be upset,” he says.

Hannibal sticks stubbornly with English. “I’m here for my portfolio.” He walks past them to the next room, goes straight to the sideboard where his portfolio lies, and slides it under his arm. Behind him, the front door opens and slams closed.

When Hannibal returns to the other room, he sees that Chirico-Jones has fled. Now Sylvain Balbec sits in the wingback chair, buttoning up his shirt.

“He models for me,” Balbec says. The rumble of the Vespa drifts in through the open window.

“I’m sure he does,” says Hannibal.

“I’ll need two, for the lovers. Perhaps you would consider—”

“No.”

Balbec clicks his tongue. “How conventional of you.”

“I’m not conventional. Desmond is conventional. He is a rich, spoiled boy who thinks he’s a good artist.” 

Balbec face sharpens. “I don’t require my lovers to be good artists. Fortunately for you.”

Well, shit. Will rubs his face. Balbec might have talked his way out of this whole Chirico-Jones debacle—but he’s doomed now. Hannibal has gone very still.

At least Balbec has the decency to realize he has struck below the belt. He raises a pacifying hand. “You have talent,” he says. “But your work has no life.”

“I haven’t mastered the watercolors.” Hannibal sounds like a child making excuses.

Balbec shakes his head. “Your drawings are no better.”

Hannibal’s mouth is soft, falling open, just as it did when he first saw Balbec’s sculptures. “I draw what I see.”

“Exactly.” Balbec stands up and comes to Hannibal. He takes the portfolio out from under his arm. Opening it, he starts flipping through Hannibal’s work. “You illustrate. You reproduce. You are no better than a Xerox machine. Where are you in this? Where are you in any of these?”

Hannibal says nothing. He is vibrating on the balls of his feet. If Will didn’t know from Balbec’s plaques that he lives another fourteen years, he’d assume this is the man’s last night on earth.

“An artist puts himself in his work. A hint of himself—always. Like a secret he whispers in the clay. A true artist doesn’t hide.”

“I don’t hide,” says Hannibal.

Balbec’s eyes go wide. “Then show me.”

Hannibal lunges at him. Balbec drops the portfolio, papers scattering across the floor.

Hannibal tears at Balbec’s shirt, rips it off while kissing him in furious grunting bursts, driving him back against the wall. He presses his whole body up against him, pinning him to the wainscoting. Balbec chuckles, thinking all is forgiven. He strokes the taut lines of Hannibal’s arms. Hannibal growls low in his throat. He bends to Balbec’s chest, starts mouthing at the skin there—not kisses, more like pecks, his teeth leaving imprints that bloom under Balbec’s chest hair. Balbec grabs at Hannibal’s ears, trying to soften him.

Hannibal won’t be gentled. He fastens his mouth to Balbec’s neck and starts sucking. Balbec relaxes into it for a moment, but then: “Agh!” He pushes Hannibal off him, his hand to his throat where Hannibal has bitten him.

“Have you lost your mind?” Balbec takes his hand away. The skin high on his neck is raised and purplish, beaded with blood. “People will see this!”

Hannibal wipes his mouth. He’s breathing hard, his eyes blazing. “A true artist doesn’t hide,” he spits, and without stopping to pick up his portfolio he stalks from the room. Will races after him.

Hannibal veers into the next room, takes down his sculpture from the trophy shelf, and exits the studio with the sculpture bouncing under his arm.

Turns out Hannibal Lecter isn’t art to be hung on anybody’s wall.

This is for the Writing Meme:

Pick any passage of 500 words or less from any fanfic I’ve written, and stick that selection in my ask/fan mail. I will then give you the equivalent of a DVD commentary on that snippet: what I was thinking when I wrote it, why I wrote it in the first place, what’s going on in the character’s heads, why I chose certain words, what this moment means in the context of the rest of the fic, lots of awful puns, and anything else that you’d expect to find on a DVD commentary track.

I love that this meme is so old that it mentions fan mail. We are keeping the artifacts of old tumblr alive here at Chez After-The-Ellipsis! I'm happy to continue doing these, and don't worry about length - I made you read 200,000+ words of my writing, I promise you I can handle 600+ words in my inbox.

I looooved writing young horny Hannibal. Especially after just dealing with the remote, enigmatic Hannibal of the Esmeray Sayar vignette. But Hannibal with Sylvain Balbec is maybe the most relatable version of Hannibal? In that he is making these recognizable human mistakes like sleeping with a person he knows is bad news, getting his tender cannibal feelings trampled on, and lashing out. It's really almost wholesome except for the whole pouring-molten-bronze-into-his-frenemy's-eyeballs thing.

Like all the major people we meet in the memory palace, I wanted the character of Sylvain Balbec to be a broken-mirror version of Hannibal. Balbec is around the same age as present-day Hannibal, a sophisticated man at the forefront of his field who possesses a difficult to pin down foreignness, a perennial outsider who by sheer force of charisma has turned himself into an insider. Balbec isn't a serial killer, of course - but he's a serial seducer who takes pleasure in influencing and molding beautiful people. Haha, yes, literally because he's a sculptor, but also figuratively because he is a trusted mentor who manipulates his students in the creation of his own art through which he eventually possesses them as trophies on his shelf. This is a pretty pedestrian version of evil. When it comes to bad men, Balbec is a guppy to Hannibal's great white shark, but that's the ironic pleasure of this section. Balbec is taking advantage of this naive young man, but this naive young man happens to be Hannibal Lecter, so we know Balbec is on the fast track toward comeuppance.

This passage is when the truth comes out: Balbec has more muses/lovers than just Hannibal. I wanted this section to feel familiar, a miniaturized retelling of the Will-Alana-Hannibal triangle in HWPOV. Hannibal walks in on Balbec with Desmond just as he will later walk in on Alana on the phone with Will. His heartbreak at this betrayal is palpable, even as there's perverse enjoyment in his reaction, too, like he's pressing down hard on the bruise. Hannibal keeps getting himself into these psychosexual triangles; it's one of his patterns! A perverse pattern to keep replicating, as Hannibal is such a possessive lover that, in entering into these dalliances, he is all but dooming himself to an eventual emotional explosion. But maybe the inevitability of the explosion is part of what attracts Hannibal to these people in the first place.

Will takes a backseat in this chapter, an almost invisible narrator inside Hannibal's memory, but this is one of the few moments when his reactions are foregrounded. I love his side comments: "Oh no, why would you--" and "Oh, so we're doing this now," because this is exactly what I was thinking while writing this section. It's so agonizing being a bystander as Hannibal just makes things ever more awkward and confrontational.

A deceptively small detail that is actually key to the goings-on is Hannibal deliberately parking his bicycle right next to Desmond Chirico-Jones's Vespa. There's a classist undertone to this image, just as there is a classic undertone in all of Hannibal's interactions with Desmond, an art student from a wealthy British family who often condescends to Hannibal. Desmond believes Hannibal's big dark secret is that he yearns to be a professional artist but can't pursue it seriously because he's too poor. This isn't exactly true, but it's just true enough to expose Hannibal's early insecurities around money and artistic taste. Remember, my version of Hannibal isn't a count to the manor born; his elevated aesthetics aren't inherited. He has cobbled them together, Tom Ripley-style, a hunter who moves through the world seeking out these class markers, adopting and absorbing them from the people he meets. Both Balbec and Desmond sense this about Hannibal, which is part of why Hannibal is so devastated to find the two of them having sex behind his back. It makes Hannibal feel like an outsider who is getting rejected by these two insiders.

“You illustrate. You reproduce. You are no better than a Xerox machine. Where are you in this? Where are you in any of these?”

I've always been kinda meh on Hannibal's drawings in the show. They are intricately rendered but bland, sorta soulless. Looking at them, you can't tell anything about the person who made them, almost like Hannibal is hiding behind them. IMO those drawings are a critical part of Hannibal's person suit. They are concealing his true art: the murder tableaux and cooking which are the vividly idiosyncratic expressions of his deepest self. Flesh, blood, and bone are Hannibal's chosen media through which he transmutes the images inside his head into reality. Drawing is just a hobby.

But Balbec doesn't see the murder tableaux or the cooking. He only sees the drawings (and even worse, the watercolors!). He takes Hannibal to task as a copyist, which cuts right to the heart of who Hannibal is, as Hannibal's whole modus operandi is absorbing and imitating the people he loves. Balbec's question, "Where are you in this?" is the theme of the entire fic, really. Who is Hannibal beneath the imitation? Who could Hannibal be if he were finally to stop hiding, to drop the performance that is his carefully constructed identity?