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❘❙❚ ISSUE #23 ░░░░ VOL. 4 ❛ WAR OR JUST ME ❜ ┆🌹
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Ben hated the fervor of the time between battles, the endless call to wait in tension for enemy troops. Some here and others there; he hated even more that Vought wouldn't let him go out and fight and kill some Nazis. It was absurd the position that others put him in, everyone did it! Millions of eyes were on him, there were promises and expectations that he would raise his shield, save the innocent and kill the enemy. Wasn't it ridiculous? Like the stories Rosie used to read him back in the military base. They made her a stupid girl or a good woman, sometimes she was so lost in the flash of cameras and the hundreds of journalists raising their pens and shouting headlines, that he wanted to tell her to go home and he would continue with the press, he didn't mind questions about his powers, or acting as a man with a heart of gold. He could do all that as long as people believed he was that way. Wasn't it funny? The role of a soldier was no longer the dream he once had, what he had been taught at the military base since he was a child was a tale. He may not have read "The Brave Tin Soldier" or "The Boy Who Wouldn't Grow Up," but he was told that war was like a chessboard: whites and blacks; reality was different. War wasn't black and white, and there was no need to fight for it, as it was already won for his country.
He had had a hundred meetings with world leaders and he wasn't talking about presidents, no, he met the people who moved large amounts of money and generated monopolized industries for the dependence on raw materials, water or oil. These people asked him a thousand times if his powers were real. He had been shot entering a room, taken to the Holy Land to see if he could step on it or else he was possessed by a demon. He had been exorcised... many times; a Chinese boss had forced him to participate in a ritual to find out if his powers were divine. He had to participate in every crazy thing to prove his powers and present himself as a friendly and, above all, human man. Ben wanted to be friends with all of them because the place he deserved was among them. He was the strongest man in the world and wanted to be that in everything: starting with the public power: the masses.
Smile, be fake but don't let it show. Act in front of the cameras, tell people you'll save them; tell them you're not God, but you've been blessed just like them. We are a gift, God sent Soldier Boy to serve them. The thing was, Ben was tired of playing a role that wasn't his. Not because he couldn't - he had shown he could win the heart of every American citizen - but because he wasn't sure if it was what he wanted to do with his life. When he was a child, he wanted to be a soldier. It was the only job he saw as possible, they were on the other side of the fence, inviting him to be like them and they nicknamed him "Soldier Boy." He wanted to fight and all that shit, be a good man. He could keep trying, but... what was the point of being a soldier in a war they were going to win? Why bother? There was a solution he had been thinking about since the start of World War II: Why not send him to kill the idiot Hitler? A face-to-face threat would suffice, the same with Mussolini and Hirohito. A mission with Rosie. They were unstoppable.
