Chapter 10: Dear God

"God, if I'm to die young, send me to heaven; I've already been to hell."

Robin existed; it was the most generous thing someone could say about his current state. Laid out in bed, thinking of what-ifs, wishing things had gone differently. Feeling hot, stuff, and worthless.

He let out a hot breath. Earlier in the year, he had felt something like this, the wear and tear of being alive getting too much. Everything inside him had been hurting.

He wished that was the case now. He'd take pain over the numbness he had been stuck in—the drifting from place to place, not really living outside of a few brief moments of anger.

Once, not long ago, he took something for this. Some combination of drugs, legal or otherwise. To feel something, anything.

He killed Dove. He's dead, and Robin killed him. It was the same song and dance that he had gone through before. He killed almost every one of substance, outlived or drove them away.

It wasn't worth thinking about.

Now, he just sat alone in his dorm room. Staring at drab grey walls and a distinctly empty bed in the corner of the room. A constant reminder of his failure.

Robin felt something; philosophers would call it emotion. Something a better man might express through song or speech or something. Something that caused the muscles and tendons that make up his body to constrict his throat.

Something that causes him to let his head fall back and stare blankly at the ceiling, hoping for answers, hoping maybe. Finally, the big man was finally listening. His body moved on its own, muscle memory of a motion not done in years since he was a child back home. Hands pressed together, head tilted down. It felt wrong and uncomfortable and caused his muscles to itch.

"Hey, God." He said finally, then paused. Thinking, trying to wrangle his tongue to speak correctly.

"Sorry to disturb you, just figured you might be here to listen in finally. I tried to raise you a couple of times before but ain't ever heard anything back, but I suppose that's how you work, ain't it?" He trailed off slightly but shook his head to continue.

"I got a favor to ask, just a small thing. I know I ain't supposed to ask for things, and I know I'm supposed to welcome challenges and shit 'cause it's just you testing me, right? But I just-" He cut himself off, letting out. His voice was small, barely more than a whisper, but it carried over the empty room.

"The good book says you made the world in a week. So that's all I ask for, just one week, to get my world in order. One week to let me take a break." One week to let himself die.

"I know I ain't supposed to ask for stuff like that. It's selfish, but you seen me down here, ain't ya? I've been throwing myself into the shit. I've been fighting the good fight. Don't you think a guy deserves a break after a while? Maybe let me just visit home if nothing else?" His voice broke at the end as he finished.

He waited, and waited for what felt like almost an hour. He received no response: no holy revelation, no words in the wind–just silence.

His throat let out a strangled, desperate noise as he stood to his feet. He wanted to cry but couldn't. His body wouldn't let him—a prisoner in his own flesh. "C'mon; you gotta give me a sign, something. Please."

The silence still reigned in the dorm room as Robin stared at Dove's empty bed. A scream tore from his throat. "Give me something! Anything!" He screamed himself hoarse, waiting for a sign, letting out his anger by grabbing a chair and tossing it at the wall. Mindless violence to relieve some of the pressure building in his gut.

Minutes later, however, the silence remained despite his angry pleading. No holy vision, no twinkling stars, no burning bush. Nothing but his desperate breathing and silence. Robin was alone in his room.

He felt himself slump against Dove's bed. He tilted his head upward, looking at the ceiling, and some species of a smile spread across his face. Like, the whole thing was oh-so funny.

His body moved on autopilot, fleeing the room, looking for someplace, any place that wasn't here.

Robin didn't know how he found himself by the cliffside. He knew he had to have walked there, but he didn't have any memory of it. He always ended up back here, one way or another. Something about it drew him toward it. Maybe it was the silence, away from the cacophony of life in Beacon, away from prying eyes, most of the time at least.

He wasn't sure what compelled him to unsheath his sword, but the mere sight of it disgusted him now. Tacky, gaudy, useless. It reminded him of his own self.

Robin Dubois, blew it on his first mission and got his teammate killed. And now everything felt so… gray.

A wellspring of anger cropped up at the thought, and he tossed the sword off a cliffside; it tumbled down and down until it hit the river below with a sad plink. He regretted it almost immediately, fucking stupid. What was he supposed to do now, fight with his dagger?

All he could do was stand. Stand and stare out at the city. Dove's city, really. At least, that was how he had come to think of it in his time so far.

Dove who had given his life to help the people in that city and would never even be known by a single one of them. Who had dreams and aspirations, who wanted to make it big in the festival but wouldn't ever get the chance to fight in it, let alone make it big.

…Unless.

His brain broke from the pity party, synapses firing as an idea formed in his head. Dove couldn't compete, but his team still could. Robin still could. If the Tournament even allowed for three-man teams to compete.

They could compete, but more than that, they could win. And they could make sure that Dove's name was broadcast across the world. It wouldn't be easy; they'd be going up against prodigies and champions the world over, but what other choice did they have? Sit back and keep wallowing in self-pity? They'd do it because they have to.

They'd do it for Dove. He'd do it because if he didn't, he'd lose what was left of his mind.

[center]-2-[/center]

The human body was a wonderful thing. With just the smallest amount of focus and denial, it could ignore any wound, any desire, any of those little things the body screamed at you that it needed. You could banish those to the back of your mind, consigning them for as long as you dared to the I'll hand it later problems.

Robin had been sending so many things to that pile that he started to grow a morbid curiosity about how long he could keep it up. It's stopped being about how tired he is, how hungry he is, how thirsty he is–and had become a matter of how long can I forget it all?

Getting Sky and Cardin on board with his Vytal plan had been easy; neither of them had any argument against it or even wanted to argue against it. The only thorn in the plan was Ozpin, who, in his infinite wisdom, had attempted to convince them to take on a replacement teammate.

A replacement teammate, what a load of shit. It'd leave them worse off in cohesion than they already were. Eventually, even Ozpin caved. CRDL would be allowed to participate in the Vytal festival as a three-person team, which, while rare, had precedent. None of those teams got past the first round, but semantics.

Which led him to his current state. Standing alone in a training room, the wrecks of training drones all around him, and sweating his ass off, pistol and dagger in hand. He hadn't gotten around to getting a new sword yet. The numbness had faded, and in its stead, a cold, angry sense of furled determination sat in his gut. There was a taste of blood in his mouth he couldn't quite remove.

Just as he was about to move to turn the drones back on for another round, the door to the room opened, and Robin turned. Blake strode into the room, stopping not far from Robin.

"Uh… hello?" Robin started cautiously.

"When you killed, was it White Fang?" She spoke suddenly, abandoning all pretense of subtly.

Robin stared, polaxed. "What the fuck, who starts a conversation like that?"

"Did you kill White Fang?" She asked again, her tone demanding.

"No, it wasn't White Fang, ya crazy bitch." She flinched back at his tone. "Jesus, not everything involves the Fang. I know you fought a robot or some shit, but they aren't the only things we gotta fight."

"Sorry…" She said slowly. "I just needed to know. I heard the news about it, and I couldn't get the thought out of my head."

Robin shook his head. "When you said, 'I'll reach out to you later,' this wasn't exactly how I envisioned it. I pictured more blowing up some Fang warehouse and not getting interrogated if I started to kill them."

"I mean, we still could do that if you want." She offered.

Robin stared at her. "You got some problems, don't you?"

"Like you're anyone to talk." She shot back.

"Point taken." He said, and the conversation trailed off awkwardly.

"So…" She gestured vaguely at the room. "What were you even doing here?"

"Jerkin off."

"Ew."

"Not really; what's it look like? I was training." Robin scoffed.

"Without your sword?" She asked pointedly.

"I broke it; speaking of which, where is the gremlin on your team? I'm gonna need her help." Robin spoke, dancing around the topic of how he broke his sword.

"Which gremlin? We got two of them." She said.

"The weapon gremlin." Robin clarified.

Blake shrugged. "I don't know."

"Well, that's really useful, thanks." Robin sighed. "So, how's your hunt for the White Fang going?"

"Shit." She said simply. "Only managed to find like one warehouse, and that was just one of Torchwick's hideouts. They've gone to ground, and I can't find any of them for the life of me."

"What would you even do if you found them?" Robin asked. "I mean, it's not like you can just let them go. They are terrorists, after all."

Almost immediately, he realized that might have been the wrong word choice if the conversation was supposed to remain civil. Her face twitched and morphed into an indignant anger.

"They aren't terrorists!" She shouted out, then took a breath. "Not all of them. Most of them are just fighting for their freedom. That's something I'd expect even you could sympathize with."

"Fighting for freedom by stealing from dust shops, capturing Grimm, and blowing places up. Real heroic stuff." Robin said dryly.

"Most of them don't want to be doing that. It's… it's all Adam's fault." She retorted. "He's been the one advocating for more violence."

"And the rest are just following orders? That doesn't give 'em a free pass. They could have done what you've done. Left, tried to make things right. Most of them haven't."

"Who are you to go judging what they can or can not do? You haven't been there; you haven't met with the people on the ground. And the situation isn't nearly as morally black and white as you make it out to be." Blake protested.

Robin shook his head with a scoff. "Oh, yeah, classic. Moral relativity. A hollow argument that implies the death of philosophy and morality. The thing is, people are born knowing right from wrong on some level. We're social creatures, human and faunus alike. It's in our blood. There's a reason we call people who can't tell the difference, psychopaths. It's a mental illness. It is, by definition, wrong."

Robin spread his hands theatrically. "'In those days, there was no king in Israel. Everyone did what was right in his own eyes.'" He gave her a pointed look. "Even way back when we knew moral relativity was a dead end. Nothing more than mental masturbation. Right and wrong are the same in almost every society. It's little cultural addendums that change parts of it where we place value. I value being bold and direct, whereas others might differ to authority and social hierarchy in ways I'd find gross. But we all know murder is wrong. Stealing is wrong. Hurting others is wrong."

He took a look down at his own hands for a moment. "Those that do it anyways are wrong."

"Then why did humanity oppress and enslave the faunus for generations? Why is there still, to this day, enough discrimination and hate to fuel an entire worldwide organization that you deem terrorists? It might be easy for you to philosophize in your ivory tower there, but reality tends to disagree." She gave a laugh—a bitter thing. "If everyone knows what is right or wrong, then why do so many choose to do the wrong thing over and over? I've seen faunus be worked to death in dust mines from a young age. Branding people like cattle. Where does that fit in your little philosophy if we aren't meant to hurt each other?"

"We weren't meant to." He agreed quickly. "'And the second is like, namely this, You shall love your neighbor as yourself. There is no other commandment greater than these.'" He spoke the words solemnly. "The problem isn't not knowing right from wrong. The problem is that people choose to be. Maybe they think they're in the right, maybe they're insane, maybe they just don't care. The end result is the same: people get hurt, and then people have to hurt them to stop them. People like you. It's a cycle of never-ending hurt. And the only way for it to end is for people to shatter it." Robin wished he was the kind of man who could do that, but he wasn't.

"So I gotta ask again. When you do find the White Fang, what are you gonna do?" Robin asked.

Some form of understanding dawned in her eyes. She spoke slowly. "I'll do the right thing."


AN: Hi, got all stupid philosophical and shit again; needed something to distract from the angstpile that was the first half of the chapter. Good news tho, it's all up from here on out, Literally cannot get worse, so the only option is to start crawling upward. This is the end of Volume 2 so to speak, and we onto volume 3. Why do I keep ending these volumes on Blake conversations? Pretty weird. Anyone this one is rough around the edges, even by my low standards. I just finished it like five minutes before posting. Hope y'all enjoy anyway, call out any mistakes, and as always, have a wonderful day!