This was supposed to be about Starfire, hence the title. And somehow, it turned into being about more about Robin and Cyborg. Nonetheless, I enjoyed where the story went, and I hope you all got something out of it too.

The review charity drive is over. Those interested in the results, feel free to check my profile. Reviewers, I thank you for your time and your trouble.

10

It was Robin's worst nightmare come true.

They were stuck in heavy traffic.

There was no crime to serve as an excuse to teleport, fly or otherwise take drastic measures.

Nothing good was on the radio.

And the 'God' thing had come up. Again.

"You know you're going to have to talk about it sometime," Raven told him with a severe maternal tone. "You might as well get it over with."

He sunk down in his seat and tried to avoid looking at anyone. "Batman never made me talk about it."

"The floppy paper reading material for girls that I have been using to research your Earth ways have expressed that open communication and conversation are signs of a relationship that is as solid as the rock! I understand that this is a good thing, although for some reason a relationship that is rocky with a Y is a bad thing. Do you not wish for our relationship to be like a rock without the Y, Robin?"

"Oh God."

"See, you're halfway there, man."

"Shut up, Cyborg."

"Heheh. Oh, move up time!" Cyborg's foot hit the pedal, and they scooted up in a short spurt that caused everyone to sway briefly. It was going to be a long ride home.

"Come on, dude, just tell us why you hate God! It's not that hard! We won't judge you or stuff, you're in a super safe place right now."

"I don't hate God," Robin said meekly, feeling trapped as all four sets of eyes of varying levels of spirituality honed in on him.

This was going to involve feelings. They knew how he hated having feelings. Why couldn't they just let him not have feelings? Was that so much to ask? He let his head thump against the glass of the window, repressing the urge to rub his still-healing chest. No point in drawing attention to something that had taken quite a few days for Raven to stop being neurotic over. He was the only person who really tried to be rational all the time, annoying but true.

"I don't get what you're so scared a'," Cyborg said, tapping the wheel. "I mean, we've already proven that we can work together without judgin' each other even though we've all got huge differences. But you're the only one who can't even talk about this stuff."

"Yeah, exactly! Did a priest molestored you when you were a kid or somethin'?"

"Shut up, Beast Boy," Raven, Robin, and Cyborg all said while Starfire tried to figure out what 'molestored' meant. "And no," Robin added, carefully avoiding everyone's eyes again. "It's nothing like that."

The quiet stretched out, broken only by occasional car horn honks and someone a few cars away yelling in Korean-accented English. Robin finally sighed and gave in, hoping that at least if he gave them what he wanted they'd let it go so they could get back to how things were supposed to be.

"It's just... horrible things happen," he said into the horn-speckled quiet. "And God doesn't do anything. And that makes me angry, because if I were God, I'd do something. So I figure either he's a jerk or he doesn't exist, and I'd rather it be the second one because the first one is depressing. People talk a lot about salvation and things abstractly, but it's the concrete that I've seen make a real difference in people's lives. If you want to save someone, you go out and make the world a better place. Praying is just mailing a letter to an imaginary person so you don't have to do anything yourself." Cyborg started to interrupt, but Robin raised his voice slightly and talked over him. "So that's me, that's my answer. Now if we have to hash this out, then I'd at least like to get the same thing in return. I want you all to tell me." His eyes looked at Cyborg, then Beast Boy, then Raven, then Starfire. "I want you to tell me how any of you can possibly believe in anything up there that actually cares about us. I know I don't have to take my shirt off to remind any of you what kinds of things happen in this world. But if any of you believe in God that much, justify that to me. Give me a reason to believe, if you can."

"I saw my mom and dad die in a river," Beast Boy said quietly, and suddenly the honking car horns weren't so loud anymore. Everyone went still as statues except for Beast Boy, who kept rubbing his knuckles on the back of Cyborg's seat. "I mean, I didn't see the last parts, but I saw the water just go over them. I hate that stupid baptism stuff Jesus lovers do, it makes me thinka that, no 'fence Cy. There was a tribe who took me in. They weren't good people the way a nice white bread Jesus freak would say is good, but they were good people in the way that mattered to me. I went from Africa to America and it was kinda a shock. Heh. But, um. It taught me some things. Going through that. Lemme put it a way you'd like, okay Rob? It's the actions that count. You can find God in a jungle if you want. In the middle of the muddy season when everything's all dirt an' 'skeetos. In the droughts. You don't need a nice carpeted place or one of those baptism dunking things to be holy. You just need t'do what God wants. God's in all of us if we care. He's in the bees and the grass and all the things He gave us, if we care and treat them right and help them treat us right. That's why I believe. 'Cause I'd probably have turned into a monkey and stayed in the jungle forever and been gobbled up by somethin' if people hadn't believed in me and been nice to me. It's like a big circle, but it's like being bigger'n the circle, too."

"Aaaannnndd that beats what I was going to give," Raven said very, very quietly. At first Robin was afraid that Beast Boy would get offended by it, but then he saw the two of them share the tiniest of smirks, and he relaxed.

"I guess I'm not a lot different from string bean here," Cyborg entered into the confessional with pastoral vocal control. "What can I say, we all hurt. Beast Boy, you had it worse than me, I think. My parents are gone... that's kinda their fault. No big mystery there. And I was never close to 'em so it didn't hurt as much as it probably shoulda. Yeah, I lost a good bit of me," he added, thumping his chest with a clang. "Nothin' important though. It's a miracle that I'm even alive, even out of a bed, let alone doin' the stuff we do together. The technology's amazing, sure, but it's amazing because it lets the human part of me make a difference. If I'd been born even ten years ago, maybe just five years ago... definitely if I'd been born to practically any other family in the world... I'd be dead now. I'm not. I like to think we all have things we could thank God for, but He made it real obvious with me." Cyborg chuckled.

Raven went next. With her hood up, she looked almost like a priest, though the confession role was entirely flip-flopped. "I went through life thinking that my existence was an abomination and a curse. I hated life. I hated myself. That... that didn't really change until I met all of you," she admitted with delicate hesitancy. "And if it weren't for all of you, I never would have defeated my father. I know Trigon made me intentionally. I know why I was made from a demon's blood. But now, I have friends who respect me and trust me. I know how to smile. I know what it is to be happy. And so I wonder if maybe the fact that I had a human mother was intentional too. The monks of Azarath taught me many things, but most of it was secular. They didn't want to fill my head with potentially dangerous ideas about spiritual ideals. But I'm learning. And I find that every time I give the world a chance, I learn something interesting that makes the world seem at least as wonderful as it is terrible."

All eyes turned went Starfire, who ehehed bashfully and toyed with her hair.

"I... I must admit that I feel a little of the disappointment," she confessed, looking down. The faintest drizzle of rain began to patter on the T-Car's roof and speckle the windows. "Not in you, Robin," she added hastily at Robin's blanching expression. "In myself. Friend Cyborg, Raven, and Beast Boy, you have spoken of your feelings for the spiritual in a way that I do not feel that I can match. And worse, I do not think there is anything I can say to change your mind about how you feel, Robin." She smiled wryly, looking beautiful in a sad sort of way. The rain started to come down a bit harder, drowning out the car horns. "I could tell you all of things in my life that make me have faith in that which cannot be seen, but they would be Tamaranian concepts and Tamaranian words. It wouldn't mean anything to any of you no matter how hard I tried to explain it. And I cannot help but feel as though an... an opportunity has been lost here."

"An opportunity, Star?" Robin prompted gently, seeing her hesitate.

She looked up at him again, smiling brighter and yet somehow even sadder. "We have grown together and become closer, have we not? We learned from the times that were not so joyful and turned those times into lessons to make the joyful times even more full of joy and love of life. But this great struggle with the Church has come and went away, and do not see how I have learned anything about it that would make you feel differently, Robin. I feel that I have, as it's said on this planet, flanked the test." In his head, Robin briefly begged everyone to not correct her, and everyone complied. "I should have important and meaningful words to say, because faith and spirituality are important and meaningful things, but I do not. I cannot say anything about what has transpired to make it all the better or to instill within it meaning or morals. I do not know what to say about it, or why it happened. The opportunity is gone and now I have nothing except even more questions, and that frustrates me."

Beast Boy's ears perked. "Hey, maybe that's the lesson!"

Everyone looked at him quizzically.

"That there isn't a lesson," he told them as though talking to stupid children.

"I agree with Beast Boy," Raven said, and Robin heard a fuse in Cyborg's head pop and sizzle gently from shock. "Don't look at me like that, it happens sometimes," she snapped irritably. "Faith takes the shape of those who hold it. Like the lives of those who have faith, faith itself needs to change and grow. That means you can't ever wrap it up with a bow and call it 'done.' If you encapsulate it into a single lesson, you render it in stone as a permanent shape when it's meant to grow and shrink - to enlarge and encompass new things, as well as shrink to accept disappointment. If we still have unresolved issues, if things don't get neatly encapsulated into an adventure with a happy ending and an obvious message, that just means we're still keeping our minds open to change. That's what you meant, right, Beast Boy?"

The shapeshifter gave a snaggletoothed grin. "Uh, yeah. Couldn't've put it better myself!"

And that was, for the moment, at least, it. There were no more great confessions or emotional testimonials. There was nothing more to say. All the Titans had apparently arrived at the same place Starfire had complained of being at - a simple lack of words. But there wasn't anything wrong with not having more words to say, sometimes.

Since traffic wasn't letting up and it appeared that they were going to be stuck for quite some time yet, Cyborg turned on the radio. After the standard arguments over the right station, Robin admitted that the one type of religious music he didn't particularly hate was gospel. And that became the team's Cyborg-led introduction to Africa-American spiritual music, belted out with extra 'soul.'

Robin had to forcibly stop himself from singing along to the passionate, happy-melancholy melodies, even as he told himself that it was all ridiculous make believe. Then again, he supposed, a boy who went around fighting crime in costumes with a green furry person, a half-robot, a half-demon and an alien probably wasn't the best person to decide on strict delineations of reality, now, was he?