"The problem of retelling what's happened to me isn't pain, though it does exist. The problem is story, and the problem is time, and the problem is the friends I don't believe I'll ever see again, and the idea that there is always a last time, and it is always sooner than I'd think, like, or expect.

I suspect that is the problem of us as well, or part of it. I've never come back, before. I have always left the past behind, until I had no choice but to confront it, again and again, and relearn the same tired lessons endlessly until I accepted the truth of them. And then I had to move forward. It's not the same as coming back at all."

Loki has leaned back in his seat a little, frowning at his own hands folded in front of him on the table. He turns his head to Mobius. "I want to ask, certainly. But I don't think that demanding a retelling would actually solve the problem of time minus distance." A little shake of his head. "It isn't that I want what was. It's that I want it to be a part of what is to be, and I have no idea how to do that."