Loki -2021-2021 May 2026

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.”

September broke him. He found a timeline where Thor was alive—not his Thor, but a Thor who had lost his Loki in 2018. This Thor wept into a beer at a dive bar. Loki sat beside him. He didn’t say, “I’m your brother.” He said, “You look like you’ve seen a ghost.”

He smiled, stepped into the new year, and became the version of himself he had always pretended to be. Loki -2021-2021

So he waited.

In May, he saved a child from a burning building in a timeline where fire obeyed different laws. The child’s name was Anders. He was six. He had green eyes and a stubborn chin. Loki told himself it was a strategic anomaly—a variable worth preserving. He did not admit that Anders reminded him of a younger, crueler version of himself, before the fall, before the void, before his mother’s gentle hands. August was quiet

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. “I invented suffering

2021–2021. Short. Impossible. Perfect.