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He would have been lying to himself if he said that he couldn’t remember anything. Yes, it was true that he couldn’t remember much other than his own life most of the time. But sometimes when he was lying in that stupid cot, in this stupid place, he saw flashes of something else.
Someone–a man–holding an instrument and praising the red, white, and blue, asking for a better way, eventually begging to be heard.
What had Booth told him? Attention must be paid.
This person, with their face identical to his, had not gotten his attention. Instead, he rotted away into something else. The Balladeer was dead, replaced by a mockery of, well, he didn’t know. Lee had never been good at being human, though that was a strange thing to admit. From the moment he was born, he had always screwed something up. He could never be normal, not like Robert, or Marina, or, God forbid, even his mother on a good day.
Normal people didn’t do the things he had done. Normal people also weren’t coerced into becoming assassins. All because he had pulled a trigger three times, he was doomed to walk endlessly around a carnival. All because he listened to a few definitely crazy people, he was doomed to be stuck with them.
But they weren’t all crazy, not really in any meaningful way. Some were off their rockers, yes, but Booth did not seem crazy to him when they met. Moore was often an idiot, but she wasn’t crazy. Zangara had lashed out in pain and frustration; Leon had fought against the big powers.
Were they all unreasonable? Maybe, but that would mean he was unreasonable too. (That was not something he could admit yet. There were many things Lee couldn’t admit to himself yet. He had an eternity to figure them out, yet that was still not enough time.)
One thing he knew was that he was no longer fully human. There was something inside of him that felt wrong. Maybe it was the bullet, maybe it was just the fact that his heart had stopped beating long ago.
Or it was because he was stuck between a figure filled with hope and a man who had been beaten down by everything in his life. He never directly asked Booth about the Balladeer, but he had picked up bits and pieces.
They had the same face, same voice (which was funny to Lee because he had never been able to sing), and the same propensity for change. The Balladeer just didn’t decide to shoot the most important man in the country, of course.
But if anyone in this wretched carnival was right, they were the same person. That would have been insane to him before the assassination. But now? Now, he didn’t know what to believe.
Sometimes he would stare out into the carnival, with all its games and prizes, and see something in it. It was something he almost couldn’t describe, something private to him and only him. With sparkling lights and golden rays, it looked like a piece of heaven.
It was a stupid thought; he would have never been allowed in anyway.
And of course, there was the Balladeer, in the center of it all like always. Lee could never escape his past or his present.
Not even his future.
The Balladeer had left him something, a prize made specially for him. He hadn’t told anyone about it, though he knew that Moore knew. With her eyes alert and mouth poised for gossip, he assumed everyone would have known by now. Instead, she had stayed silent, her eyes filled with a little bit of pity. Why would she tell anyone anyway? She was stuck like the rest of them, too.
If he closed his eyes and thought hard enough, he could see things. Mostly the Balladeer’s memories, a reminder of who had originally been there before him, but sometimes it was Lee’s own memories, things he had forgotten in this hellscape.
Rarely, he could see other parts of the past, other people on the edge of glory and destruction. If it wasn’t the past, it was the future, filled with other versions of assassins. People who had received the final push of their descent, whether through tragedy or insanity.
He envied it, the fact that they had fully made their decision. They had agency; they would never be questioned if they actually did it. (Though of course, that wasn’t the truth. They would always be questioned, especially because of him.)
He would have been lying to himself by saying he didn’t want the president dead at that moment in the book depository. But did he think he could have done it alone?
A small part of him did. It wasn’t like he didn’t know how; all of his training in the Marines had actually meant something for six seconds. The gore hadn’t scared him from high above then, and he had started to run right after. He wouldn’t have needed eight other people telling him what and where to shoot. He wouldn’t have had the thought to go after someone else, but he was capable of it.
The ring of the shots had been satisfying; that was something he could truly admit.
He wondered what Ruby thought of firing the gun, of killing a killer.
And then the thought horrified him so much he wished he were truly dead.
He had never been like this before meeting the rest of the assassins (Marina would have disagreed, so would Edwin Walker, that son of a–).
The Balladeer had been so good, such a model citizen. He had tried his hardest and only got beaten down at the eleventh hour.
What was Lee then?
He was not a model citizen, not by any means, but he didn’t believe he was a monster either. No matter what the situation was, he was always in between. And he hated it more than anything, but what else did he have?
A bullet to the stomach and a lot of nothing?
No, it wasn’t right or fair, but this carnival was the only thing he had left. Another thing Lee could admit: he had always been a selfish man. If he weren’t, then he would still be alive. He was selfish because he had wanted to die, even more so by killing another man.
(Or two.)
He always forgot that part of the story; maybe it was the Balladeer’s fault, maybe it was his own guilt. Even so, it didn’t stop the fact that he had done it. Paranoia and fear may have helped him on his way, but he was undeniably guilty.
When had he become so smart?
It wasn’t because of anything he had done or learned, Lee knew that for sure. It must have been an attribute from the Balladeer. Another thing he received that he didn’t deserve.
Sometimes, when he couldn’t fall asleep in his stupid little cot in this wretched little carnival, he saw flashes of something else. No matter what it was, he could admit one thing.
It could never be him.