Jason and Tim have similar competence standards and end up swapping employees sometimes.
---
"Boss, I'm outta the game with this hip---"
"You're outta the beating-up-traffickers game. I got a guy who can get you into the scaring-the-rich game just fine."
"You mean, like...?" A fist into an open palm, quirked eyebrows.
"Nah, verbal intimidation only unless someone steps up to the plate. Mostly you got good eyes and this Wayne kid values having people around who can observe things that aren't spreadsheets."
"Hey, you said I did pretty good at that Excel thing!"
A pointed look.
"Ohhhh. I'm gonna get to learn spreadsheets and threaten people? Oh, man. Thanks, boss!"
"They've got the same insurance, too, so that'll roll over automatically."
---
Meanwhile, on Tim's end of things:
"I noticed that you tend to get impatient with slow results, that you're happy to yell at people for safety violations, and that your plan to remediate the company's incompetence in these areas involves 'firing every single one of them who can't get their head out of their ass.'" Tim smiled.
His employee smiled back. "I mean, that's why you hired me as safety supervisor, right?"
"Of course; your proactive attitude is one of the reasons we chose you. However, I also noticed that a lot of your frustration stems from employees whose work is being impacted by personal issues, often ones stemming from attacks by prominent local criminals."
"Listen, I'm from Minnesota. I know from cold. And I also know that you can't let a little hypothermia from Mr. Freeze screw up your numbers, especially not when those calculations impact lives." Squared shoulders, hands on the hips---yeah, definitely more of a cultural fit with Jason's organization.
Tim nodded and continued his pitch. "And you're competent with a firearm, correct?"
"Hey, I'm not about to go postal just because---"
"No, no, you misunderstand me. You're a skilled employee. I'm just wondering if you might benefit from transferring to a work environment in which you can shoot some of the people who are actually causing these problems."
"I'm sorry?"
"You have a dartboard with Leeds's face on it because he screwed up so many times after that Ivy incident put his kid in the hospital."
"...Okay, I admit that's not my best look."
"The organization I'm recommending you to has a printer next to the firing range; it's sized specifically for target paper."
"Oh."
"It's also an organization that works specifically to keep kids from needing to be in the hospital."
"Oh. You mean---" There was really only one group it could be.
"They need someone with your eye for logistics. Hood's work isn't 'legit,'" Tim made careful air quotes because the dorkiness tended to put people at ease, "but your insurance would roll over to them automatically. And you can rest assured that they take safety very seriously."
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Tim, sitting on the carpet, waist-deep in print-outs from Black Mask’s latest debacle, looked at the door. Looked at the pile of invoices, photos, blackmail, and stupid little evidence baggies from Mask’s stupid little torture party. Looked at his couch, which was Evidence Island for that thing with Scarecrow last week, and his coffee table, the last refuge of JL prototypes. Maybe whoever was knocking at the door of his top-secret vigilante hideout would just go away. Or maybe they’d have the decency to bring their own chair with them. He picked up his phone and accessed his front door security cameras.
Red Hood, one arm occupied by a pair of Old Joe’s pizzas, knocked again.
On the one hand, Hood might shoot him. On the other hand, Tim hadn’t eaten lunch and it was (he checked his phone again) 8:13 PM.
Tim turned all of his thigh-piles into carpet stacks and made his way to the door, where he removed three physical barricades, three digital barriers, and four traps for the unwary. He activated his “If I die in the next ten hours, this is the last person I was seen with” failsafe. Then he cracked the door on its chain. “Sorry, I didn’t order any pizza,” he snarked.
Hood huffed a robotic sigh through his voice modulator. “I need a favor.”
“I’m aware,” Tim said. There was no other reason for Hood to show up. And it had to be something complex, otherwise Hood would just do what he’d been doing, which was texting him a casefile and sticking a “One month of no murder attempts” coupon to Tim’s door when Tim solved it for him.
Hood held out the pizzas and waited. He didn’t even twitch his hand towards his gun.
“Fine.” Tim undid the chain and opened the door for him.
Hood left his helmet on one of the hat hooks by the front door, revealing a wryly curved mouth and eyes that weren’t any more Lazarus green than usual. He even gestured to the guns at his side with a cock of his head. Leave those here too? A generous offer from a crime lord who loved shooting people.
Tim shrugged. If it got down to violence, he’d rather Hood not be grumpy about it.
Hood shrugged back, kept his guns, and followed Tim into the solarium, which was an antechamber that Tim mostly used when he wanted to taunt potential snipers. It had a breakfast nook, two barstools, a dead plant from his well-meaning decorator, and ceiling-length bulletproof windows.
Tim tinted the windows with a flick of a wall switch.
“One Canadian bacon with onion and artichoke hearts,” Hood—Jason—said, dropping a pizza box in front of the left stool. “And one basil and roasted garlic with extra pecorino.” He dropped the other pizza in front of the right stool and sat.
Tim sat next to him. “Thanks for getting my order right.” He could be polite.
“I asked Alfred,” Jason said.
Proof someone else knew that Jason intended to visit him. Jason really didn’t want to kill him. At least at the moment.
(Jason’s pizza order had changed from when he was a kid; he’d always ordered the meat-lover’s before, maybe for the extra calories. Food insecurity sucked.)
(Tim’s tastes had changed too, but his pizza order hadn't. No one ordered “Canadian bacon with onion and artichoke hearts” unless it was for him, specifically, and it was…nice, knowing that whoever had ordered the food had thought of him. Mental insecurity sucked too.)
They did justice to Old Joe’s thin-crust for a while, eating in silence.
When he only had a couple of slices left, Jason took a deep breath and said, “None of this leaves here, aright? Tell anyone I asked about any of this and you’ll wish you were dead.”
Tim waved his hand. “Duh.”
“Right. Okay.” Jason rubbed his forehead. “You know how sometimes start-up companies get successful and then they suddenly realize that they have a million employees instead of ten and that they should probably have things like an HR department and a pension plan?”
“Ah,” Tim said. Jason “Red Hood” Todd didn’t need the help of Red Robin, teen vigilante. He needed the help of Tim Drake, teen CEO. “You got your fiftieth employee?”
“I have to know what FMLA is now,” Jason said, a thousand-yard stare in his eyes. “It’s basically what I’ve been doing anyway, but there are so many subparts.”
Tim made a sympathetic noise.
“And I’ve been meaning to set up some kind of…retirement…thing…for the past two years,” Jason continued. “Pretty much since I started, but there always seemed to be bigger things, you know?”
Tim nodded. Effective long-term policy or not, preteens addicted to fentanyl could definitely make someone put a 401k plan on the back burner.
“And I had Gloria handling birthdays!” Jason said, obviously on a roll now. “Like getting cards for everyone on the day and getting them signed and all? But she had to move to Florida cuz her Mami’s getting up there, and no one else wants to get the cards and pass them around, but now I’ve got grown-ass armed adults who are miffed that their birthdays don’t get a card, and some other people think there should be cake too if we’re going to be revamping the birthday system anyway!” He looked at Tim, his eyes wild. “The whole thing is distracting everyone from killing traffickers and setting up community support systems! Grown-ass adults! Birthdays!”
“Birthdays are the devil,” Tim said, sympathetic. The Wayne Enterprises R&D department had had a brief kerfuffle over them too.
“Incarnate,” Jason said. “But also, no. I mean, I get it, some of us ain’t had people who celebrated our birthdays before! I want everyone to feel appreciated. But at this point, all Black Mask has to do is say ‘cake and ice cream’ and his goons will be able to set up shop while my guys shoot each other.”
This level of chaos didn’t just happen; it was likely only the visible part of an iceberg of underlying dysfunction. “Gloria did a lot more than birthday cards, huh?” Tim asked.
Jason winced. “I begged her to come back and she said she was tired of nagging me about the pension plan.”
“Good for her,” Tim said mildly.
Jason glared.
“It got you here, didn’t it?”
Jason glared harder, but he stuffed his mouth full of pizza instead of threatening Tim with bodily harm.
Tim flexed his fingers. Gotham was better with a functional Red Hood gang and this would get him unprecedented access to Jason’s plans, but he also needed to come out of this alive. “If I help you with this, I’m going to need to know a lot about your organization.” He held up a pre-emptive hand. “I don’t care about your exact plans for Gotham’s drug trade, but we’ll be looking at your org charts—your chain of command—and getting nitty-gritty about it. Also, I want to be compensated as a consultant.”
Jason frowned. “You want money?” He glanced at Tim’s ostentatious kill-me windows.
Tim shrugged. “You can choose. I’ll bill you a fair amount, and you can compensate me with your money or with an equally valuable amount of your time—and I’ll know how much you value your time in an exact dollar amount by the time we’re done.”
Jason snorted. “That your usual deal when you’re a consultant, or is that a Jason Todd special?”
Tim smiled his best Janet Drake smile. “It’s the exact same deal I offer anyone in the JL or the vigilante community. The Jason Todd special is when I let people roll up in my DMs for the low, low price of not slitting my throat. Again.”
Jason had the grace to glance away. “Gotcha. Better get started then. Like you fancy CEO types say, time is money.”
"Like we fancy CEO types," Tim corrected, and had the pleasure of watching Jason wince. Time for Red Hood to get his hands dirty with all the blood and ink that went into being a responsible twenty-first century boss.
Tim reviews Jason's operations management and makes a suggestion.
"Your first move: hire a head of sanitation," Tim said.
"You think a janitor's gonna solve my suddenly-successful-startup problems? What, by sweeping them away?" Jason rolled his eyes.
Tim steepled his fingers. “The good news,” he said, “is that your drug distribution and community norms enforcement hierarchy is very clear. You also have people doing marketing, program management, HR, facilities, and admin. Your system of rotating duties when people get injured isn’t bad—people generally benefit from cross-training—but you should formalize the top positions and compensate your new leadership team. Including sanitation.”
“Sure, sure, I'll just tell one of my guys their job is to be head shit-scrubber instead of a badass neighborhood protector!" Jason threw up his hands.
Tim raised his eyebrows.
“It’s bad enough getting them to clean up a crime scene when they’re on my literal shit list! A couple of them thought that lighting the building on fire was an easier way to get it to stop smelling bad and having DNA. Guess who had to add five new slides to his powerpoint about evidence disposal?" Jason glared.
Tim grimaced. "I had an intern in the office who thought that he could just throw trash off his desk for the cleaning staff to pick up."
He and Jason shared a commiserating look that silently said, We were both stupid enough to work with the League of Assassins, and even we wouldn't do that.
“Anyway," Tim continued, "since you're dealing with...that...you can just hire an outside party. Lots of people in Gotham know how to clean up dead bodies and keep their mouths shut. I can advertise the position and send you the likeliest candidates for an interview. I’ll have to incorporate you, of course, but I’ve had the paperwork ready since I got back from the Middle East.”
“Incorporate me?”
“Red Hood LLC, technically."
Jason's breathing became calculatedly even.
"Once you’re legit in the eyes of the law, we can work on squaring away everyone’s taxes and keep you from getting Capone’d.”
“I’m as legit as one of Two-Face’s two-dollar bills!”
“Yeah, but when you’re an LLC, all your crimes are white-collar crimes, and no one cares about those.” Tim shrugged.
“...Pretty sure that’s not how that works, bud.”
“It’s how the court of public opinion works. And if anyone tries to say that Red Hood, CEO of Red Hood LLC, and Red Hood, notorious vigilante, are the same person? Tell them to prove it. So what if you have the same outfit? It’s a free country and people can wear what they want. And if they ever get your DNA results, Oracle says no they didn't.”
Jason tilted his head and started smiling. "You want Red Hood to be the Scarlet Pimpernel and Percy Blakeney. At the same time."
"The more blatant you are about it, the better. Rub elbows with Gotham's elite and tell them that you can't imagine why someone would let a Crime Alley vigilante ruin their ability to wear a red hood as a fashion statement, but in your company, people have spines. Especially when they're job creators. If you play your cards right, red headgear will be back in fashion."
“You ‘have amnesia,’” Dr. Sharma repeated, her eyebrows arched.
“Oh yes,” Q said. He cheerfully waved his hand at his bandaged head. “Mugged this morning. Terribly traumatic. Physically, not mentally, since I don’t remember any of it, of course.”
Dr. Sharma’s eye twitched. “I see.” Over the past year of therapy, she had grown inured to Q’s shite, but this was perhaps a new level of it for her. “Amnesia,” she repeated.
Q beamed. “Judging by the dark circles under my eyes, this seems like a bit of an opportunity for a fresh start anyway,” he said. “Past me looks overworked.”
Dr. Sharma had been trying to get him a holiday for the past four months. Her “I see,” every time M had denied his request for leave had become steadily sharper. Now her eyes gleamed. “Amnesia,” she said, smiling wider than Q had ever seen.
(Also on AO3)
—
“Amnesia,” M said, squinting at him from behind his desk. “Really, Q?”
“M,” Q replied, tasting the name as if he’d just learned it. “Seems a bit funny to work for a letter, but I suppose my past self had his reasons.” He leaned back in his chair and cast his eyes around the room as if those reasons might be visible if he looked for them.
M’s hand twitched toward the security button on his desk lamp. “You answer to the letter Q,” he pointed out. “You clearly remember some things.”
“The name Q has silent vowels,” Q said, straight-faced. “Q-U-E-U-E. A long line in A&E is the first thing I remember experiencing, so it seemed fitting. You know, waiting for something that never seems to come gives you a lot of time to think.”
M glared. “If this is about your leave—”
“I am leaving, yes,” Q interrupted. “I even have the paperwork filed for Queue Smith, since apparently you lot do that here.” He quirked his eyebrows. “You still haven’t told me what I do, exactly, but I assume it’s some form of tech support, not anything crucial. Something other people have been trained in.” Like Q had been training R and X for the past six months, for instance. Specifically to deal with M’s bizarre separation anxiety.
“You are actually one of our most valuable assets,” M gritted out, clearly aware that said valuable asset was a lying liar who was lying to him at that very moment.
Q smiled. “What a shame I can’t remember anything, then,” he said. “No value whatsoever now. In fact, Dr. Sharma distinctly said I was as useless as a pin-pricked prophylactic, and the rest of the medical department agreed with her.”
M’s eyes narrowed and he sat a little straighter. “Dr. Simmons would never go along with this.”
“Dr. Simmons thought the whole thing was very novel,” Q disagreed. “In fact, he said amnesia might be under-diagnosed, particularly in injured field agents being recalled for missions.”
M frowned. “How patient-centric of him.”
“Oh, terribly.” Straightlaced Simmons, head of Medical, didn’t always see eye to eye with Q, but they both prioritized the health of the people under their care. M wouldn’t find anyone in-house who would challenge Sharma’s diagnosis. Now for the killing blow: “Everyone says that if I’m lucky and have a nice long rest, then I might remember some things. But who knows? Amnesia is unpredictable. I could be out of the game for good.” Q gave an innocent shrug.
“It can be dangerous, walking around ignorant in the world,” M said.
“Maybe,” Q said. “But I got mugged while I was working here with all my memories intact, so really, nowhere is safe, is it? Might as well be unsafe in the Maldives.” Q gave M his most beatific expression. It was rather cute of M to threaten him with being killed, as though Q didn’t have a dead man’s switch for exactly that contingency.
M gave him a long look but eventually sighed. “I’ll put you on an indefinite medical leave. Don’t do something stupid with your free time.”
Q stood. “I’ll do whatever I please. Since that is, in fact, the point of the term ‘free time.’”
—
Q spent five days eating take-away and playing Elden Ring in his pajamas. On the sixth day, he had enough energy to move, so he took the train and then a bus to a little town in Andalusia, dreaming of egg-and-potato fry-ups and sunny olive tree-laden views.
Warmth. Sunshine. Red roofs and white stone buildings. An outdoor cafe where he could drink his tea and people watch.
Down the street, a wrinkled old woman stooped down to scratch a brindled dog whose whiptail flew back and forth at the attention. Q watched them until they rounded a corner out of sight. When he brought his gaze back to his own table, Bond was sitting across from him. Shite.
“Amnesia,” Bond said. His eyes crinkled at the corners.
Q stared him down. “I’m sorry, do I know you?” If Bond asked about a mission, Q was going to send him back to R and X for replacement corneas.
But Bond shook his head. “You can call me James. We don’t know each other outside of work,” he said. “I thought we could change that.” Bond gave him a half-smile, somehow sheepish—different from his Target Acquired smile. His bright yellow I Heart España t-shirt was more camouflage than Q had ever seen him in.
“Caminito del Rey has beautiful vistas,” Bond added, his blue eyes locked on Q’s. “Or I know a place with good tapas if you’d rather eat than hike.”
This might be a work-shaped trap. But there wasn’t any tech in the Gaitanes Ravine, and yellow wasn’t the color Bond wore when he went anglerfishing. Additionally, traversing a treacherous one-meter-wide walkway carved into a rock face a hundred meters above a river sounded like it was genuinely Bond’s idea of a good time. “If we went hiking,” Q said, “it wouldn’t be efficient. I take pictures of cool bugs. I lollygag to look at spiderwebs. I get distracted by rock formations.”
“If I wanted efficient,” Bond said, “I’d wait until you ‘got your memory back.’” He offered Q a wry tilt of his mouth. “I have it on good information that you’re currently useless, and I don’t expect we’ll need any of your skills from the office.”
Bless the medical staff’s ability to gossip. Q exhaled and slouched a little. “You’re really here just because?” he asked.
Bond shrugged. “We’re good at being useful together. I thought we might be good at being useless together too. If you like.” He tilted his head.
Q stood without answering.
Bond stood with him. His designer blue jeans stretched flatteringly around his thighs. No concealed carry. His watch wasn’t one of Q’s. He had a knife in his boot, but that was sensible enough. His t-shirt showed off tan arms criss-crossed with pale scars and a smattering of graying hair. He had a red España bucket hat tucked into his belt.
007 on holiday.
Q smiled. “Lead the way.” He extended his hand.
Bond took it. In the center of a rural village steeped in machismo culture, Bond held his hand. “I have a car,” he said, and they walked, still linked at the fingers, to where Bond had parked his entirely normal Mitsubishi Mirage rental. Good god; a hatchback. Not even four-wheel drive. Bond was really giving this ‘useless’ thing a genuine effort.
If this went well, Q would have to send 006 a basket of explosives. Rather than leaving his mugging-based amnesia up to fate, he’d rather desperately arranged for a surreptitious blow to the head from one of Six’s experts in cranial violence. He hadn’t expected that his memory loss would lead to something so lovely.
January: an Omega watch that could level a city block. February: a Montblanc garotte-pen that could write a headline as easily as take a head off. March: a tuxedo jacket made out of a new stab-proof nano-fiber.
Q Branch had assigned these to 006, 005, and 009 respectively.
When the new Aston Martin was ready in April, Bond was too: ready to put his persuasive blue eyes to good use.
"Q."
"No."
"The odds of one going into the Tiber again are---"
"I specifically waterproofed it. It's technically a nautical vehicle. The answer is still no."
Bond smoldered.
Q kept his dark-ringed eyes on his monitor. His shoulders slumped for a moment before straightening. "Fine. If you sign this." Q handed him a letterheaded sheet of paper.
Under the circumstances that the man known as Q is removed from his position at MI6 due to the destruction of a gadget that Q has provided to me, I, the undersigned, pledge to provide at minimum a replacement monthly salary for at least 48 months immediately following the removal of Q's employment.
"No one's going to fire you."
Q arched his eyebrows. “Here: your current issue.” He handed Bond a plastic Bic pen. The top half had been chewed on and not by Q; the molar imprints didn’t match.
Bond’s lip curled involuntarily.
Q smiled.
Bond signed the contract.
Later, after the car and its surrounds exploded, Q turned up at Bond’s flat with two cat carriers in tow. “I expect we’ll be kept in the manner to which we’re accustomed.” He flopped onto Bond’s sofa.
It’d probably be a month or two before MI6 hired Q back, which was time enough for good Quartermasters to have a rest and be spoiled. Bond would have to thank 006; the Omega had worked perfectly.
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When Jason starts to prioritize cooperation as well as vengeance, Tim suspects Jason's self-control still isn't that great. Since he's Tim, well...
He conducts some tests.
Hood is about to murder someone that they need information from when Tim calls out, "Hey, Hood, has anyone ever told you that you're a Decepticon wannabe who probably fucks himself to the sound of his own robot voice?"
Hood stills.
The drug dealer who sold tenth-grader Benny Garcia fentanyl gapes in a way that shows off his recently-missing teeth.
Hood drops the dealer in a heap and turns his shitkicker combat boots in Tim's direction.
Tim bolts. Batman will swoop in to continue the dealer's interrogation; he and Hood have figured out a good-cop-bad-cop thing, though Batman still seems bemused about the chance to be 'good cop.'
Hood races after him.
---
Tim makes it to a safe house off of Robinson Park. He probably lost Hood about half an hour ago, but it never hurts to be careful. Especially when---oh, shit.
"This place is filthy," Jason says, sitting on the kitchen counter that Tim never uses and looking with disdain at Tim's collection of empty energy drink cans, takeout boxes, and crime yarn. Jason's not wearing his helmet or domino, and he taps his boot heels softly against the cabinet door like a little kid. Not exactly danger signals.
But for a moment, all Tim can look at is the boots. It's stupid; the knife at his neck was closer to fatal. But the kicking had hurt the worst.
"Since you apparently have time to run your mouth," Jason says, "and since someone stole my target, it seems like we both have time to clean up in here. I went out and got trash bags." He nudges a box on the counter next to him. The trash bags are the sturdy kind, not the flimsy cheap kind or the extra-strength hide-the-body-parts kind.
Tim has been meaning to get trash bags for this place for three weeks. It's just that he doesn't visit often, and when he does it's usually when he's injured or tired, and he could get things delivered but that's a paper trail he could avoid if he just made time to visit the bodega down the street... "You're a trash bag," he says, even though it doesn't make sense.
Jason rolls his eyes. "Just for that, we're mopping the floor too. Luckily, I came prepared." He hops down from the counter and opens the little mystery closet next to the fridge. Inside: a broom, a Swiffer, a bucket, a pack of scrub brushes still in their plastic, and a jug of bleach.
Ohhh, that's why the closet is so narrow. It's supposed to hold cleaning supplies. Right. Tim definitely knew that. Tim definitely doesn't just have a roll of paper towels...somewhere...that he sometimes puts dish soap on.
He squints at Jason. Still no green danger-eyes. "Darcy and Elizabeth would never let you be part of a throuple with them," he tries.
Jason pulls out a trash bag. "They've got issues anyway."
"Helen Keller would make up new words so she could sign how ugly your face is."
"She was a socialist," Jason says. He holds the bag and gestures at Tim's kitchen table. "So we'd probably just talk about organizing the working class. I don't think looks would come into it. Also, way to be a dick."
"You're so pathetic that Jane Eyre would give up on you like she didn't give up on Rochester," Tim says, figuring he did the research for this attack, so he might as well use it.
Jason actually laughs a little bit. "First of all, there's a lot of power exchange going on in that decision, so jot that down," he says. "Second of all." He looks Tim in the face. "If I start to lose my temper, I'll leave, okay? Or you can just ask me to."
"Even if I asked right now?" Tim asks.
"Even if you asked right now," Jason confirms, though he eyeballs Tim's mess.
Jason's still holding the trash bag. Hands out, open body language, seemingly not homicidal.
Tim had planned for a lot of things with this encounter, including a body bag. Trash bags weren't one of his considered variables. He starts picking up empty cans. "This one can be for recycling," he says, dumping the cans into Jason's bag. New things from old materials. Jason likes that symbolism shit, right?
(Though...new things. Old materials. If there's anyone who ought to be good at that, it's someone who got raised from the dead.
Tim smirks and keeps the thought to himself. Operation: Limitless has been a startling success; he doesn't need to verbalize all his inside thoughts now.)
("Kid, I can tell you're thinking about a zombie joke," Jason says anyway. "You can only tell me after we've brought this shit-heap back to life.")
Not what Bond had expected his question to be. “Six years.”
Q frowned and stared off into the middle distance above his desk, his fingers tapping against his plaid trousers. No protestations that undercover work is hardly my wheelhouse or even a really, 007, just his little genius brain working all the angles of the problem.
Bond waited.
“Long enough to be comfortable instead of demonstrative, short enough that I might still put my hand in your back pocket while we’re in a queue. Workable.” Q eyed him, smirked. “Fun.”
Hello, all, and Happy New Year! After ten years, I'm retiring as MI6 Cafe co-mod.
I joined the MI6 Cafe when CassTea and isthisrubble put out the call for co-mods. The Cafe was even on livejournal in that first year! Thanks to this amazing community, the Cafe has grown into a place that hosts events like competitions, watch parties, readalongs, chats, game nights, and of course 007 Fest.
I have been so grateful for all of my co-mods: Rubble and Cass, Christine, and lately Kitten-kin and Myn. I also can't thank the volunteer squad enough for their help. However, the glorious Lin has been my biggest source of education and inspiration. I briefly ran the Cafe solo, and so I can say with authority that the Cafe would be far less organized and the plates far less spun without her.
It has been so much fun to work alongside my fellow mods making fandom fun happen for so many people. We always reflected on our progress and came up with ideas for how to make the next year even better, including trying new things like the revamped 007 Fest format and Last Moodboard Artist Standing. It was a blast to do that kind of problem-solving and share that kind of creativity!
Unfortunately, RL has been intrusive over the past year, and the time I've had for fandom has dwindled considerably, so it has become difficult to put my best mod foot forward. It's time to bow out.
I'm so, so deeply grateful to have helped lead the MI6 Cafe. It is in great hands with Lin, Kitten, and Myn, and I look forward to seeing what they come up with in 2026!
(And for my last modly reminder: don't forget to do the end-of-year survey! The Cafe wants to hear your opinions and ideas!)
