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You know he's up to something. Kurloz Makara is always, always up to something. He thinks he's good at keeping things secret, but his eyes always give away the fact that he's planning.
It was kind of surprising that he approached you to consummate your moirallegiance, coming to you after one of your shitty nightmares about things going wrong that you ended up being unable to stop. He mimed something about understanding and you believed him, because you'd heard the rumors about what happened as well as anyone.
And it's not like he was ever awful at it. He's a good listener, which you still find funny because before he shut himself up for good you accused him of never listening to anyone. Stopping himself from speaking has changed that for the better, though it's still unnerving as fuck to look at his stitched-up smile and know that no matter what you say or do you'll never be able to convince him to reverse what he's done.
You had your suspicions about his intentions at first because outside of the listening and attempts to get across that he got it, he was shit at every other conciliatory action, hesitant to pap or even touch you. But he got better at it, and you started to be more and more open with him, hoped that maybe some night he would feel like acting the same way.
*
It gets hard to sleep when there's so much you need to do, so many things going wrong every second and no way to prevent even a fraction of them. Your pan aches constantly. Sometimes you fly off to some abandoned part of one of your friends' planets and just scream. Use your psionics to fling around rocks and branches and bits of landscape in frustration until you're reminded that there's something else awful happening that you need to stop, another of your friends you have to warn before it's too late.
It's always too late.
Kurloz tries to help when he's around (which isn't often; he's damn near unreachable unless he wants to be). He lets you lean against him, takes off his gloves and puts his cold fingers up to your temples and it feels so good, almost better than pailing, and you know you'll be safe if you just close your eyes for a minute...
*
When you wake up spouting religious text and shaking off the effects of mind control you realize you were wrong.
*
You didn't think his beliefs were dangerous. It's hard to find motivation to keep going when you're all stuck in shitty game limbo for the foreseeable future and you figured if that's what worked for him then whatever, you could tolerate it for his sake. But if he's deluded enough to think he can just use you (and Meulin, and fuck knows who else) as pawns in some shitty scheme to rebuild his stupid cult then it's worse than you thought.
You're supposed to keep him safe. Letting him believe in this bullshit is the opposite of healthy.
You grab his hand.
"The cult's gone," you tell him, rubbing his fingers with your thumb. "It's just you now. There's nobody else, man. Let it go."
He pulls his hand away, puts both of them on your cheeks, running them up into your hair. You relax into his touch. Maybe it was that easy. Maybe all he needed was for you to tell him what he'd been suspecting all along. His religion died with the rest of your people and now that there's just the twelve of you not-quite-adults left there's no point to any of it.
His mind thrusts itself back into yours with no warning. He's not gentle. He's not smiling. Before his eyes start glowing purple they're completely blank in a way that's more frightening than anything you've ever seen. He's not going to listen to reason. Of course he's not going to listen to reason. Why would he give up on this without a fight when he's never given up on anything?
*
It hurts.
At first all you can feel is pain. All you can see is purple. All you can hear is the sound of your own screaming.
You have to focus. You can't just submit, even if everything in your pan is telling you to. You can be as stubborn as he can, can ignore everything you're being told in favour of what you feel is right.
You reach out to grab his throat, concentrating on squeezing just enough to make it hard to breathe. Your psionics flare out in shaky, sparking tendrils to assist. Kurloz is so vulnerable physically, more than any of your other friends, and especially when he's so caught up in his mental fuckery that he's not paying attention to what's happening around him. When his pan realizes he needs air to keep going he'll have to stop.
You've got this.
*
You haven't got this.
He's not stopping. It's like he doesn't care.
Maybe he doesn't care. Maybe that's how much you've fucked up, not realizing until now that he has no problem dying for this.
He stitched his lips shut for his god, ripped out his tongue, is trying to tear apart your motherfucking pan for this fictional messiah. He's not going to let his own death stop him. He's the martyr, it's him. It's always been him. You needed to get to him sweeps ago, before you'd been quadranted, even, to have a chance at changing his mind.
You let him go.
While he's catching his breath you realize what you'll have to do. It's not gonna be pretty and you might not survive but you can't let him win.
He smiles at you and all you want is to pap his beliefs right out of him. You pity him so much your pumpbiscuit aches. He's going to be so hurt when he realizes everything he's done has been for nothing and you're starting to realize you might not even be there to help him through it.
You belong to me, he says straight into your mind. You haven't heard his voice in so long you almost forgot how deep and commanding it was.
"I always have," you tell him, because it's true. He's got you twined around his claw and it's too late for you to do anything but ensure that he can't use you for anything he was intending to use you for.
Projecting your psionics outward to bowl over imps or grab objects has always been as easy as breathing, so pushing them inward shouldn't be any different. You've got a shitload of power and you're capable of doing so much more damage than you've ever tried to. You know this.
He'll know it too, in a second. He's not the only troll here with hidden tricks up his sleeve.
You close your eyes.
"But you can't have me," you hear yourself say, before you can no longer hear anything over the throbbing of your pan, the rush of blood coming out of every orifice it can find.
You always thought Latula would be the one you ended up covered head-to-toe in yellow with, and that's hilarious. It's the wrong fluid, the wrong quadrant, the wrong everything. Everything's wrong and as hard as Kurloz tries to make you stop he's too late, just like you were too late.
You both fucked this up. Game over. It's a draw.
You choke on your laughter and your blood and eventually you pass out right into his waiting arms. He'll take care of you, you're aware of that much.
That's what moirails do, after all.