A voice speaks from Verity's collar, tired and resigned, no longer making any attempt to disguise its natural accent: "Ah, you want my advice now? After ignoring it before got you into this. While you're still leaning on the words of a psychopath - who also, I must add, very much brought his f...

Everything she said brushed over and past Raja like the faintest touch on his face. Fingertips ghosting on his cheeks, across his eyelids. Eyes. Crystal. Laughing. Ximena. Ximena. Raja had been floating, but the impact of Ximena in the dirt next to him jarred him back. He sputtered for breath again....

Ximena would have met more resistance repositioning a doll. Raja's head was swimming, and he couldn't have fought her even if he wanted to. He didn't want to, though. He trusted her, more than anybody. As she urged him to lay down, he mouthed her name, still trying to form the words to tell her that...

Ximena talked, and Raja started out listening, but sometimes (more and more often) he let his eyes close for a minute, and when he opened them again, the light had changed, and she was talking about something completely different. He saw Dan and the other girl that had been with Ximena in different ...

Raja gave Ximena a weak smile when she fixed his hair and patted his cheek. He wanted to say something back, something silly enough to be reassuring, but every response he could think of that involved a joke about dying would have sounded downright awful in his weak, raspy voice. Instead, he held he...

Raja's world had tunneled in, blocking out everything but the dirt in his field of vision and his fight to gasp for breath. When Ximena collided with him, it all snapped back into motion again, almost like she'd been slowing things down and then had released them back to normal speed. (She hadn't be...

Raja raised his hand in front of his chest. It was visibly shaking. He flexed it in preparation to sign, but his fingers were stiff and felt numb at the fingertips. He stood there for a few seconds, spreading his fingers and grasping at empty air to try to work some feeling back into them. The fence...

Raja almost imitated Dan's movements, wiping his sleeve over his forehead before gathering his own things up and standing. He wanted to explain his reasoning for finding the fence. His certainties, or the beliefs that he intended to hold onto strongly enough that they became certainties. He reached ...

Raja paused in his drinking to shrug again. He felt a little better once he'd had more water, and he set the bottle down by his side after capping it, assuming that Dan didn't want his backwash much the way he hadn't wanted Dan's. IM HEADING FOR THE FENCE , he wrote in the dirt, hand marginally stea...

Raja nodded in response to both questions, though it might have been kind of hard to tell. His hand was shaking, he realized, looking down at his outstretched arm. The end of the stick that he'd pointed into the dirt trembled, creating a little divot. There was an odd tingly feeling in his fingertip...

Predictably, Raja's answer to the question was a shrug and a grimace. He considered the bush that Dan was huddled up by, and then walked over to break a piece of it off. DIDNT SEE , he wrote in the dirt once he'd judged that the bush-twig-thing was sturdy enough to do so. No point in going for good ...

((Raja Narang continued from Nothing Breaks Like A Heart )) Raja had been so consumed by the drive to get away from the compound that in his panic, he'd completely lost track of everyone else. He'd been so caught up that it hadn't occurred to him until some time after he resumed walking. Obviously ...

Raja maybe had bad taste in guys, but he had always liked the look of Ambrus Lugosi. Ambrus had that dark hair and blue eyes thing going on that Raja liked, and he was tall and olive-skinned and dressed like a Byronic novel protagonist. They had read The Portrait of Dorian Gray in English lit during...

Welp. If anyone is feeling generous and wants to see more pretty boy with problems, I would appreciate it. No death offers for the moment, please.