8

As soon as he heard the news, Robin quietly went up to his room, made sure the door was firmly shut, and laughed till he cried.

After months of worrying, of protracted phone conversations with various officials, of tiptoeing around Starfire and Cyborg's ridiculous newly-stoked religious fervor, of trying to plan out every possible scenario both legal and criminal that could arise and scripting out suitable countering actions by his team, it was all going to be shut down. Just like that. The Church of His Freaking Girlfriend was to be no more, and he couldn't have been happier about it.

He couldn't have blamed that random Ohio Representative for being wary of a confluence of superheroic and religious forces. He shared the exact same concern, in fact. The original motion hadn't actually been that useful in and of itself, but it had placed focus on the Church and encouraged the government to delve in for a more thorough inspection. After the dust had settled from the resulting denominational squabbles (and if Robin had believed in God, he would have blessed the tendency of the faithful towards factionalism), major religious entities ended up dropping support for the Church, and the government had deemed theological differences sufficiently wide to kick the Church out of tax-exempt status. When it came down to it, as much as people loved gossip about heroes and appreciated the protection, they were also rightfully scared of superheroes, and most people didn't want to see costumed vigilantes become the next thing to worshiped. The real turning point had been when Superman himself had made a public statement against the Church... not very severely, just a little cautious, but that had been all the news networks had needed to spin into outright condemnation. Batman's alter ego had also played a heavy part in influencing certain parties behind the scenes. Robin decided he'd just have to take a deep breath and thank his mentor later, however tersely.

The Church had just officially announced it was officially dissolving as a separate entity. All members were headed back to their old church, presumably to be welcomed back by their smug fellow congregation members.

Maybe the team had been right all along, he considered. As far as his treating it like a problem to solve instead of something to ignore until it went away, at least. Robin knew he was prone to over-thinking things, and he certainly had his reasons for taking this especially seriously, even if the others wouldn't ever understand. They hadn't seen what he'd seen, a world that made him reject any belief in a benevolent person in the sky being in charge over any of it. He didn't really want them to see, anyway; there were a lot of reasons why he had never taken the Titans to Gotham besides the fact that relations with Batman were stiff at best. They'd seen a lot, suffered a lot, but not the worst. He wouldn't have them tainted by that red sky.

It was late. There were no alerts, crime was low tonight, and he'd already exercised himself to soreness today. He excused himself to have a relaxing ride on his bike, not mentioning that he intended to ride by the ex-Church grounds. Not to gloat, he told himself. There was to be no gloating. It was all business. He just wanted to make sure everything was going smoothly, that was all. Nothing wrong with that.

The rush of the wind over his body was purifying. Motion was progress, progress was improvement, and improvement was the closest he'd get to thinking about the concept of salvation. That was what life was about. Getting things done, not just praying and hoping for some imaginary person in the sky to do it for you. The parishioners he'd seen looked the type to mostly be scared of riding a motorcycle, or God forbid, fighting back against the evil they saw every day. Of course, Robin reminded himself, that was why the Titans were needed. It was all over now, there was no need to be bitter. And hopefully all the annoying religious debates in the team would die down now that the Church wasn't being an exacerbating element anymore.

The Church building, easy to overlook as it was, was further concealed by several moving vans and piles of boxes out in front. There was no one around, though. Apparently they were still inside organizing. But it was strange that they'd just leave things on the sidewalk like that instead of putting them in the truck. Really very sloppy and disorganized.

Robin shook his head, pushed away the sourness, and parked his bike. He'd offer to help. They were probably shorthanded, being mostly elderly people. It would be a gesture of good will and not smug triumph at all. It looked like it might rain, soon, too, and there was no use in letting cardboard and the things contained in cardboard get all wet.

He let himself in and looked around at the extremely lonely-seeming building interior, with furniture half-moved, put up into piles and boxes half-filled with half-funded decorations. They had never finished getting half the things installed that they'd talked about. He looked over an old leaflet on a chair and saw that the last sermon was about striving in the face of adversity. Strangely, Robin felt almost depressed.

Bah, whatever.

Where was everyone, though? Maybe they were all in the back rooms for some reason or other. Robin walked down the aisle, listening for sound and hearing nothing but the gentle whir of air-conditioning.

"Hello?"

A familiar red-glowing eye peered out from a shadow corner.

"Cyborg?" Robin asked instinctively, thinking his teammate had crept over to do some moving help himself.

"Why yes, I am one, as a matter of fact," Brother Blood's voice responded, rich and calm and ever so politely amused as any church pastor could be.

Robin had only just enough time to widen his eyes in shock and grope for his communicator before Blood came twirling out at him, landing a solid and extraordinarily precise backhand to the temple that sent him flying head over heels to crash into the opposite wall in a sprawl. The communicator flew in a completely different direction, leaving Robin saying a few words that would normally be frowned upon in this type of building.

"Hiding in an abandoned church, Blood? Is nothing sacred to you?" he growled, pulling out an explosive disc and flinging it the villain. He had to use one of the smaller ones; in quarters this cramped, a larger explosion could do a lot of damage to the surrounding structure.

With the pristine reflexes of a machine, Brother Blood caught the explosive and simply allowed it to detonate in his palm with the hand held well away from the rest of his body, beaming with parental superiority. "Of course there are many things that are sacred to me, Robin," he said as though it were obvious, taking a few steps forward. "Chaos and disorder, for instance." Robin charged and swung with his staff, a blow that Blood easily ducked while not even breaking verbal stride. "Human suffering and the crushing of pathetic little lives for the greater good." An upswing with the staff was deflected by the merest flick of Blood's index finger. "The natural selection of the strong who feed upon the weak, leading to future generations that are all the better for the murder of their inferior underlings." Robin jabbed, and Blood caught the staff tip in his palm. "Speaking of which, I haven't killed the church members yet, but if you keep fighting me, I'll transmit the appropriate telepathic signal. You do remember what my hypnosis is capable of, yes?"

Robin gritted his teeth briefly, then stepped back, not lowering his guard but not provoking the madman further. Why couldn't problems ever be resolved without someone evil just knocking over society's card castles for the sake of knocking them over? His communicator was... too far away. But he tried to inch towards it without seeming obvious about it. Raven and Starfire were off in a neighboring town dealing with a strange resurgence of tofu-based alien life forms, but even just getting Beast Boy and Cyborg over here - getting anyone with superpowers over here - would be a marked improvement over the current situation.

"That's a boy," Blood encouraged him warmly. "I don't see the point in harming perfectly useful hostages unless I have something to gain from it, after all. Come to see the church off their holy ground, have you? Wonderful thought. I had the same idea myself, as a matter of fact," he taunted with a grin that would have been fit on a skull.

"What have you done with them, Blood..." he asked lowly, mostly as a distraction while he kept trying to get closer to the communicator.

Either Blood wasn't noticing the maneuver or he saw it and didn't care. "Oh, you needn't worry, they're not nearly interesting enough for me to bother torturing. I actually just picked this building at random as a target, with the intention of expanding throughout the district with my own little army of loyal shopkeepers and parishioners. The thought occurred to me that it would be ever so much harder for you heroes to hinder my plans if you had to take a good bit of care in not damaging the lambs in the flock." Blood tsked and shook his head. "You Titans have never really understood. Lambs are meant for slaughtering, you know." He chuckled. "Haven't you ever eaten veal?"

"People aren't animals, Blood," Robin snapped back. Almost there. Just a few more feet and then he could lunge and roll for it. He just needed a few seconds to get a distress signal out, and then he could delay Blood long enough for the others to arrive. He hoped.

"'But these, as natural brute beasts, made to be taken and destroyed, speak evil of the things that they understand not and shall utterly perish in their own corruption,'" Blood intoned with oily smoothness. "Go ahead, call them," he added more casually, nodding as Robin froze. Blood smirked. "Call your friends here. I want to see the expression on Cyborg's face as I show him the weakness of flesh by rending yours asunder." He flexed steel fingers as though they were claws, looking almost demonic. The resemblance of his hairstyle and the metal projection on the robotized side of his face to horns certainly helped the image.

Robin weighed the risks of calling his friends into a potential trap against the risks of trying to solve this himself, and judged in favor of the former with great reluctance. He wasn't going to keep trying to do things on his own anymore, he'd learned his lesson. As bitter as it tasted even now.

"I think you'll find this flesh is stronger than you think!" he snarled, grabbing the communicator and sending out a quick top-priority distress message. They'd know it was a Blood-level threat by the code used. Taking a time out to tell them in detail what was going on wasn't in his plans.

He flung a smoke pellet at the ground and sprinted for the back rooms, knowing there wasn't anywhere else the hostages could be. If he could just get them out fast enough and slap them out of hypnosis, or at least restrain them... even knock them out, if he had to...

The stench of blood filled his nostrils.

Robin staggered to a stop in the middle of a scene of slaughter. Frail, wrinkled parchment skin torn, well-ironed and well-worn formal clothes ripped, milky old eyes were glazed over. Three husky, sloppily-dressed young men stood out from the rest; they had probably been the truck drivers or hired moving help. He looked around in horror, and counted. And saw all the faces that he'd burned into memory from his research in trying to tell them to bugger off and go worship their own stupid God instead of Starfire. Mrs. Ashton too? Yes, Mrs. Ashton too. The mere fact that her hair and clothes were in disorder seemed almost as blasphemous as the lifelessness of her body.

"Y-you said you spared them," he whispered, half to Blood, half to himself, and maybe a little bit to the God he didn't really believe in. Especially not now. They had believed in so much, and come to so little... for no reason, no reason at all...

"And you believed me!" Blood rejoined with a merry laugh, the laughter of a man who truly enjoyed what he was doing. "Sinking sand, Robin. Sinking sand."

Robin wheeled around, teeth barred in a snarl, only in time for Blood's open palm to smash into his face. His head snapped back into a shelf built sturdily to hold nigh-endless amounts of heavy study Bibles, and blackness swallowed up consciousness without mercy.