Loki -2021-2021 Instant

That was the pact of 2021: love without possession.

He knew this because a newsstand on a branching timeline displayed a tabloid: “2021: The Year We Needed a Hero.” Loki snorted. Mortals were always needing heroes. They never learned.

October. Halloween. A child in a cheap Loki mask knocked on his apartment door. Trick-or-treat. Loki had no candy. He gave her a dagger. Her mother screamed. Loki turned the dagger into a chocolate bar. The child grinned. For one perfect second, Loki felt like a god again—not of mischief, but of small, impossible kindnesses.

So he waited.

He left before Thor could ask his name.

Sylvie had pushed him through a time door. She had kissed him, betrayed him, saved him, and left him with the most terrifying gift: hope.

November was cold. He stood on the edge of the multiverse, watching timelines bloom like flowers from a corpse. He Who Remains had called it a loom. Loki called it a garden. And gardens needed gardeners. But not masters. Never again a master. Loki -2021-2021

When Loki stepped out again, the year on a Midgardian calendar was 2021.

He was Loki. God of Stories. And he had lived an entire lifetime in twelve months.

For the first few months—January to April—he did nothing. He sat in a small apartment in a reality where Asgard had fallen but New York still stood. He drank cheap coffee and stared at the ceiling. The TVA was gone. He Who Remains was dead. The loom of fate was unspooling into infinite, beautiful chaos. And Loki was… tired. That was the pact of 2021: love without possession

2021–2021. Short. Impossible. Perfect.

He had been a ghost once, in the catacombs of the TVA. A variant. A ghost who learned to love a woman made of clocks and purpose, who watched that same woman shatter into temporal confetti, and who then stepped into the howling mouth of a multiversal storm.

“To 2021,” he said to the void. “The year I learned to stop running. The year I learned to stay.” They never learned

Thor shrugged. “I’ve seen worse. I’ve seen 2021.”

He smiled, stepped into the new year, and became the version of himself he had always pretended to be.