"I'm sure I still am in a way--I still felt your command, I just had the sense and the strength to reject it," Glacius explains, stroking Carlisle's back. "As for the... fabrication of the gods, I do not know if it came down to a weakness in the strengths of our wills so much as a similarity in our feelings for you... but I do not remember much after he tried to strangle me." His mind had been numbed first by agony, and then by his partner's willing them both to stop; there wasn't a thing he could do in that situation save for lay there and bleed until the command had faded.

"In a way, it was our bond that prevailed... even back then," the ice alien murmurs. "I'm glad things went the way they did, too... even if it is starting to seem as though the only other members of my species that I will ever see again will just be... cruel mockeries."

But that's a line of thinking he really can't afford to dwell on. He only just recently managed to make his way of out of a pit of depression; he doesn't need to be toppled back into one all over again.