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.
August was quiet. He read all of Shakespeare’s tragedies in a single night and laughed at them. “You call this suffering?” he muttered. “I invented suffering. In 2021.” Loki -2021-2021
That was the pact of 2021: love without possession. November was cold
When Loki stepped out again, the year on a Midgardian calendar was 2021. Loki called it a garden
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.
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.
He drank. The year ended. And for the first time in a thousand years, Loki did not feel the need to lie about who he was.