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It was in the Romeo safehouse that Nile first heard about one of Joe’s past professions - or, as she’d put it, “Oh, so you had a side hustle, huh?” (“A what-now?” he’d asked). It was one of his and Nicky’s safehouses, meaning it had actual walls and furniture and running water and electricity, unlike certain caves belonging to a certain somebody (not naming names). One of their bookshelves had a collection of paperbacks on it (clearly a few decades old, but still in good shape) that had grabbed Nile’s attention - and so she’d pulled one off the shelf.
“The Unrepentant Gentleman?” she read aloud, raising a brow at the extremely buff and extremely shirtless himbo on the cover. “Um, guys, can I ask what’s up with all the romance novels?”
“What, do you mean, what’s up with them?” Joe echoed. “You don’t like romance novels?”
“No, actually, I do,” she admitted, deciding her guilty pleasure was safe to share with her new family. “I just didn’t expect to see a whole shelf of them in your house.”
“Why not? We like romance!” Joe protested, in the beginning stages of a pout at the mere possibility of being considered unromantic.
“Yes, you don’t spend almost one thousand years at Joe’s side if you don’t romance,” Nicky added.
“Obviously, I just… I dunno, you’re literally living out your own romance novel, I guess I didn’t think you’d need to read about others too,” Nile shrugged.
“Oh, we don’t have these because we went out and bought them,” Nicky clarified. “Look at the author’s name.”
“Josephina Jones?” Nile read aloud, and then a second later it clicked. “…Really, Joe?”
“Yes, back then publishers weren’t keen on a male author writing romance novels, so I had to feminize it,” Joe explained, unimpressed.
“It’s not the feminizing I’m commenting on.” She rolled her eyes. “You couldn’t have shown a bit of creativity with your pen name?”
“I wasn’t trying very hard there, I wanted it to still be reflective of me,” he defended himself. “Besides, the creativity is in the story itself.”
Nile turned back to the shelf and let out a whistle. “I’ve gotta say, I’m impressed? There’s a lot here.”
Joe grinned somewhat bashfully. “Yes, well, I suppose I made a decent reputation for myself in the historical romance genre.”
“The fact that we still get sizable royalty cheques speaks to that reputation too,” Nicky added with pride.
“I wouldn’t have expected this,” Nile mused. “I mean, I knew you did poetry, but…”
“It was another fun art form to explore! Feel free to read them if you like,” Joe offered.
Nile was happy to take him up on that, casting her eyes across the series of spines and pulling out ‘The Pirate’s Purloined Pleasure’. That would be as good a way as any to spend her afternoon.
A little while later she found herself enjoying the world Joe - sorry, Josephina - had managed to weave with his words. She could see why his works had been so popular, she really felt like she had been transported back in time through the use of all the tiny details – and they were probably details that Joe hadn’t had to research at all, because he had lived them instead.
But as she read on from her spot curled up on the couch, something began to slowly nag at the back of Nile’s mind. The Italian heroine with the stormy eyes was one thing, the swarthy bearded pirate character was another, but when the pirate’s ship arrived at a port in Malta, Nile dropped the book and yelled, “Am I gonna be reading about you two doing it?!”
“Of course not. You’re reading about Captain Youssef and the kidnapped Venetian heiress Nicoletta, and their passionate yet tender coupling,” Joe replied calmly.
“I still can’t believe you made me Venetian in that one,” Nicky grumbled.
Nile looked between the two of them in exasperation, before settling on Joe and asking, “Are all your books just self-insertions of you and Nicky?”
“Who else would I write about?” Joe wondered, genuinely perplexed.
Nicky nodded. “We have lived many lives, had many adventures. It was surprisingly easy for Joe to throw in a bit of narration, fictionalize a bit of conflict and pining…”
“So all your romance novels actually happened to you?” Nile raised a skeptical brow.
“Well, more or less. The locations are certainly places we have been, most of the core plot points are real enough, and the amorous aspects are of course based on true events,” Joe winked.
“Um, gross.”
“A few of the stories are completely figments of my imagination, of course. I was certainly never a witch who stumbled across a transformed Nicky-rabbit in the woods, Nicky wasn’t a prostitute in twelfth-century Cairo, I never lured him away from the priesthood by my considerable charms… But it was quite interesting to imagine if things had happened that way.”
Nile's eyes widened in worry. “Why do I feel like I’ve stumbled across some weird fantasy roleplaying kink?”
Joe smirked at that. “Let’s just say each story is an opportunity to explore some alternate histories. Sometimes I am the rakish rogue and Nicky the virginal dame, other times Nicky is the patrician ruler and I am the lowly-yet-comely serf… Which was your favourite story, Nicolò?”
“Hmm, must I choose? I think I’m partial to the one with Father Josef and Sister Nicolette as star-crossed lovers who had both pledged themselves to the church yet fell in love on a mission trip,” Nicky recalled, before grinning slyly. “That one caused quite a stir, if I recall correctly.”
“Ah yes, ‘The Missionary Position’, that was a fun one!” Joe crowed.
“Wow. That sounds, um… subversive,” Nile commented awkwardly.
“Well, I tried my best. I did like to challenge tropes and stereotypes when I wrote… but I could only do so much,” he sighed. “If you look at all the covers, for instance, I think you’ll notice a theme very quickly.”
“Lemme guess - buff dudes, swooning women, and not a single person of colour to be found?”
“You got it.”
“White people,” Nile groaned.
“Diversity wasn’t a priority in those days, to put it mildly. I would have loved to have broken the heteronormative glass ceiling, but no publisher was willing to take on anything I wrote with two men as the main couple,” Joe lamented. “I had to settle with some very subtle coding of minor characters.”
“Ah yes, what was the one where you inserted Andy and Quynh as my character’s ladies-in-waiting, who just so happened to be the closest of companions?” Nicky snickered.
“‘Bosom friends’ is how I described them, I believe,” Joe recalled with a grin.
“I’m sure Andy loved that,” Nile said dryly. But she thought on Joe’s words a bit more and added, “You know, the publishing world has changed, there’s a lot of queer lit these days. I’m sure you could get something published now where you wouldn’t have to genderswap one of you.”
“Thank you Nile, that’s a nice idea but I don’t know how feasible it really is when we’re always on the go from one mission to the next. While I enjoy the creativity of actually writing the stories, the entire process of submission, editing, publishing… It’s a lot of work,” frowned Joe. (And he had still not forgotten Skopje ‘71, when he’d been trying to meet a deadline and was distracted from their mission by trying to think of multiple synonyms to describe Nicky’s - or rather, Niklaus’ - cock. Andy’s rage had been enough to make him shelve his writing for a while, quite literally.)
“It seems like you miss it though,” Nicky observed, deciphering the mood of his husband immediately. “If it’s something you want to explore, you know we would help make that happen.”
“I do miss it, sometimes…”
“Oooh, I have an idea!” Nile perked up, having a lightbulb moment. “Joe, have you ever heard of fanfiction?”
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Less than a week later, Joe was well on his way to being fully obsessed.
“This is amazing! An infinite number of fandoms, an infinite number of plots and stories and formats and possibilities… Creativity abounds! And all for the love of a piece of media, and wanting to build upon it to share that love with others!” he gushed, clasping his hands to his heart. “I have found my people, Nile.”
“Sounds like it,” she smiled. “So you gonna pick a fandom and start posting something?”
“You know we’re not the best at keeping up to date on pop culture,” he winced. “Besides, how would I even begin to pick one?”
“So what, you’re gonna go the original fiction route instead?”
“I already requested a secure laptop from Copley,” Joe admitted, pulling the machine out from behind his back and brandishing it excitedly. “But I need your help to create an online account.”
“Sure,” she agreed, settling down with the laptop in front of them and pulling up the website. “Okay, so what username do you want?”
“JoeLovesNicky,” he answered instantly.
She typed that in and frowned. “Er… That’s already taken?”
“...What.”
“Yeah, sorry.”
“But, how?” Joe wondered, supremely annoyed.
“I mean, there are millions of users out there - maybe there’s another Joe out there somewhere who also loves a Nicky?” was all Nile could think to offer as a possible explanation.
Joe narrowed his eyes in determination. “I have to find him.”
“I said a Nicky, not your Nicky!” Nile cried, trying to calm him down. “Chill, man.”
“Do you think Copley could do some hacking and track them down?” he wondered.
“...You serious?”
“Yes! I want that username! It is quite literally the core thesis of my entire literary career!”
“Look, you’re a creative guy - I’m sure there’s something else equally meaningful, with the same basic message, that isn’t taken yet,” Nile told him.
“Fine,” Joe grumbled petulantly. “Try NickyLovesJoe then.”
“...Taken.”
“What! …Okay, how about YusufLovesNicolo.”
“...Um, sorry.”
“The reverse too?”
“Yup.”
“Unbelievable. Okay, okay. How about MyMoonInDarkness?”
“...Nope.”
“Motherfucker!”
“Dude,” Nile soothed, putting a calming hand on Joe’s arm. “You’re a frikkin’ poet, there’s gonna be some other pretty string of words you’ve used to describe Nicky that’s still available. So take a deep breath, channel that romantic soul of yours, and think of a name that encapsulates everything you feel about him.”
One hour later and too many more attempts to count, they finally managed to secure the name JoeLovesNicky6969.
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It soon became commonplace to find Joe hunched over his laptop during any spare moment, typing away furiously, only pausing to pose a question to Nicky about some precise detail from hundreds of years ago.
“This is delightful,” Joe gushed, as he hit the ‘Post’ button on another new story. “Just like that, people around the world now have immediate access to my words. And I have instantaneous access to their feedback! It’s so lovely to receive those kind comments and kudos, it just makes my day. I have subscribers, can you believe it?”
Behind him, Nicky (username: NickyLovesJoe) threw a wink in Nile’s direction and brought his finger to his lips in a shushing motion.
“I mean, if you’re okay with horny housewives reading about your adventures, I guess I’m glad you found yourself another hobby,” Andy scoffed, clearly still holding a grudge about Skopje.
“It’s more than just a hobby - I’m exploring a new medium of self-expression! I’m creating something here, it’s art!”
“The only true art is paintings of horses. This is basically porn. You’re writing porn.”
“Please, Andromache, it’s erotica.”
“Oh really?” she snorted.
“Yes, it’s much more classy. And besides, I do pride myself on my historical accuracy! I like to think that no matter how horny the housewife, they can still learn something.”
Joe received a challenge to that idea a mere day later, when a new reader (username: ArmedNacho) left a batch of comments questioning some minutiae of the historical details in his fics. Naturally, he then had to devote considerable time and effort to rebutting each and every one of their points.
“Somebody is wrong on the internet!” Joe growled. “I will not let this stand!”
“Oooh, your first flame war!” Nile gasped. “I’mna go get some popcorn.”
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It wasn’t until many months later, while they were killing time in an airport waiting for a flight, that the team got a sense of just how far Joe had fallen down the writing rabbithole.
After having spent two months off the grid on their latest mission, they were all more than a little desperate for good food, a comfortable bed, and something to do other than read and reread and then reread again the same two worn paperbacks that Nile and Nicky had crammed in with their gear. The airport didn’t have much to offer for the first two things, but Nile quickly found the terminal’s bookseller and dragged them all inside.
The New York Times best seller shelf was right up at the front, and Joe froze right in front of it. “Oh, shit.”
“What’s up?” Nile wondered, following his gaze. It was stuck on a book titled ‘That Time in Malta’, by Jaye Solanika.
“Who’s Jaye Solanika?” she wondered, until the guilty look on Joe’s face gave him away. “Ohmigod! Jaye Solanika… Joe Al-Kaysani? Really?!”
“Shhhh!” he whispered, looking around frantically. “Don’t blow my cover.”
“I guess an anagram is slightly better than Josephina Jones, but it’s still barely a cover,” she snorted, only to have her point proven when Nicky walked over to join them, took one glance at the book in question and immediately gasped, “Joe! A New York Times Best Seller? Congratulations, my love! Why didn’t you tell us?”
“Well, I wanted to keep it a surprise, test the waters a bit… And see what the reception was like, honestly,” he admitted, a bit sheepishly. “Though maybe I didn’t have to worry - if ‘Fifty Shades of Grey’ could be successful, I was fairly confident of this at least being published.”
“Always so sensitive about your work,” Nicky sighed fondly. “As usual, you had nothing to worry about. Clearly it has been extremely popular!”
“Thank you, Nicolò. I’m glad.”
“I’m very proud of you. Now, let me buy one, I’d like to read it on the plane,” he declared, reaching for a copy - and then another. “Nile, would you like one too? Actually, why don’t I just buy them all.”
“You know it’s already a best seller, you really don’t have to help drive up the numbers any more,” Joe told him, but with an eminently pleased (bordering on smug) expression.
“Of course I do. I will support my husband in all things,” he sniffed, and hauled the remaining copies off the shelf and into his arms.
They of course wouldn’t all fit into his carryon, so as they traipsed through the airport Nicky would randomly pass out copies to people as they went by. (Nile may have inconspicuously fallen a few steps behind them so she could then grab back and redistribute any copies that were inadvertently given to tweens and teens who were clearly too young for that content. Heck, now having inadvertently learned a bit too much about Joe and Nicky’s love life, she had a feeling even she was too young for that content.)
They boarded their flight and took their seats, and Nicky buried his nose in the book before they even left the gate. It was once the plane was in the air that he finally got to the interesting (read: smutty) parts, and a strange sound got stuck in his throat.
“Yusuf,” Nicky said with a forced calmness, which didn’t help against the tips of his ears turning pink. “I cannot help but notice some striking similarities between us and these characters, much more so than usual.”
Joe, recognizing that particular tone of voice, went still for a moment before plastering a pleasant smile on his face. “Oh, do you think so?”
Nicky’s face did not reciprocate with a pleased expression. “Please tell me that you did not use our lovemaking as fodder for millions of readers.”
Joe’s eyes may or may not have flickered to the nearest emergency exit. “I, that is… Who is to say that it’s not purely based on my imagination?”
“The main characters’ names are Moe and Ricky!” hissed Nicky. “Ricky has a mole on his lower left cheek!”
“Yes, and your mole is on your right cheek. Totally different.”
“I can’t believe you shared our most intimate moments with the world like this!”
“You seemed okay with it when it was just fanfiction!” Joe cried plaintively.
“That seemed more… intimate, somehow? Small scale for a niche online community is one thing, but now it has been released out into the world, beyond our control. I can see it now,” he lamented. “Half the world will become unhealthily obsessed, the other half will start some sort of culture war to score political points about same sex relationships…”
“To be fair, the fact that my book is making bigots uncomfortable is surely a point in my favour,” Joe noted.
“...Okay, yes, I’ll give you that one.”
“Are they arguing about ‘That Time in Malta’?” the woman beside Nile asked her, peeking through the seats to keep an eye on the two men sitting ahead of them.
“Uh, sort of,” she said, thankful neither she nor the woman would be able to understand the dirty details as they lapsed into archaic Italian. “They, um, have very strong literary opinions.”
“I hope they’re not bashing it. I’ve read it and it is literally my favouite thing ever. So hot and steamy! My entire book club loved it! And Janice doesn’t like anything, that prude.”
Nicky wasn’t so distracted by his ranting that he didn’t hear her, and he groaned and buried his head in his hands. Joe tried to murmur something quietly to him, patting him soothingly on the back as he leaned in closer.
“You know, they’re giving me very Moe/Ricky vibes… Do you think they’re gonna kiss and make up?” the woman whispered, somewhat too excitedly to be appropriate.
“I’m worried they're gonna do more than just kiss…” Nile winced.
Nicky and Joe did manage to keep the resolution of their argument rated PG, but some of that work was undone on their way off the plane. Too many people to count seemed to notice the book clutched in Nicky’s hands and gave him salacious winks or tried to start up conversations about his favourite part (while oversharing about their own). His face turned beet-red and he was unable to meet anybody’s eyes the whole way out of the airport.
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A few days later, Joe’s phone received a text from an unknown number.
‘This you???’ it read, followed by a string of laughing-crying emojis and a link to an article. Ignoring all the lessons Copley had tried to drill into the team about phishing scams, Joe immediately clicked the link.
‘Mal-tease’ the title began. ‘Reclusive NYT bestselling author remains a (sexy) mystery.’
“Dammit, Booker,” Joe grumbled, and just texted back a middle finger emoji.
That only served to open the floodgates.
‘Fifty Shades of Malta’, read the next day’s link. ‘Jaye Solanika is the hottest name in erotica right now!’
Then it was ‘Did the first draft of TTIM appear online as fanfic? TMZ investigates!’, followed by ‘Rumours flying of a ‘That Time in Malta’ film adaptation, fans are already fantasy casting the actors’ that led to Joe nearly pulling out his hair at some of the suggestions (“None of them can hold a candle to Nicolò!” he’d cried, only grudgingly admitting, after hours on IMDB, that perhaps one Italian actor came close).
Some of the items Booker sent along - like his result to a Buzzfeed quiz of ‘What time in Malta are you?’ - Joe could actually admit were genuinely amusing (even though he vehemently disagreed with his own result to that quiz, and should he not have been the leading authority on that?).
But one article turned out to be the straw that broke the camel’s back - and simultaneously broke Joe’s heart and brain. “TTIM fandom strife - Ricky/Moe shippers versus Ricky/Mandy?” he read aloud in a horrified voice.
“Aww, baby’s first ship war!” cooed Nile.
“But… how? What even… Do people not know how to interpret text? Not even subtext, just the actual text! Is literary theory not a thing anymore? Can people even read?” Joe sputtered, utterly aghast. The subsequent text from Booker that read “#Ricky/Mandy4ever!!!” only served to rile him up more.
“That’s it. Every article he sends me will be one extra year of exile,” he swore.
“You gotta give the guy credit,” Nile mused, somewhat impressed. “He really knows how to work those Google Alerts.”
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Both Nicky and Joe had thought the attention would have died down before Andy somehow got wind of things, but sales kept skyrocketing and news outlets kept trying to dig into the mysterious author that somehow nobody had ever seen, and then one day she plopped down at the kitchen table for breakfast and said, “So I read a really interesting book last night.”
Joe and Nicky looked at each other, and then back at Andy. She just stared back at them impassively, waiting.
When they didn’t say anything, she cocked a brow and asked, “Did you really think I wouldn’t find out?”
“Honestly? Yes,” Joe admitted with chagrin. “The only thing you read is the labels on alcohol bottles.”
“Hey!”
“How did you find out?” Nicky wondered.
“I’ll have you know that I joined a book club,” Andy huffed. When the two men just looked at her disbelievingly, she admitted, “Wine was provided.”
“There it is,” Nicky nodded.
“It was shit wine, and hours of my life I will never get back,” she complained, her eyes narrowing. “And oh, hey, maybe most important of all, it was hours of obsessed fans talking about ways to track down who the author really is. So you need to fix this.”
“Okay, I can get you a bottle of really nice wine,” Joe began.
Andy pinned him with a sharp glare. “Fix. This.”
“I mean, I can try, but-”
“I’m serious, Joe,” she stated, getting up from the table - and as she walked by him, she dropped a hand on his shoulder and gave a sharp, pointed squeeze. “And in case you need any extra motivation? I volunteered to head up the local Ricky/Mandy fan club, and let me tell you, do I have some ideas...”
Her cackling could be heard as she made her way out of the room and down the hall, and Joe gulped. “I have to fix this,” he declared.
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“You want me to what?” Copley wondered, thinking he must have heard incorrectly.
“I want you to kill off Jaye Solanika,” Joe told him calmly.
“But you just told me you are Jaye Solanika.”
“Yes, I am.”
“And you can’t be killed.”
“Really? I had no idea,” Joe deadpanned, before rolling his eyes. “I mean kill off my alias. Surely you’ve faked people’s deaths before, you were in the CIA weren’t you?”
“I can neither confirm nor deny that,” Copley stated.
“Cute, real cute. But seriously, can you work your spook magic and have them declared legally dead or something, and tie this whole thing off?”
“Are you sure you want to do that?” Copley questioned. “Wouldn’t an author’s death only make the book all the more popular?”
“Maybe for a while, but I think the craziness would eventually calm down. And at least it’d put an end to all the talk of sequels and movie rights and interview requests… Do you have any idea how many emails Jaye’s account gets each day? It’s too much!” Joe cried.
Copley sighed. “Let me see what I can do.”
A few weeks later Copley did manage to come through. Jaye Solanika had met an untimely end in as boring a way as they could think of, to try and dissuade any further digging into his life - simply passing away in his sleep from an undiagnosed heart condition.
(“I like the symbolism,” Joe explained. “His heart was too big, too full of love for this world.”
“Yes, very appropriate,” Nicky smiled, dropping a kiss on his lips.
“Yeah, that’s great and all, but you realize that a press release saying he ‘passed away in bed’ is just gonna make everybody think he died during sex, right?” Nile pointed out.
“...Dammit.”)
Copley’s machinations had also arranged an estate to manage the book royalties and any other inquiries - and any such inquiry for adaptation rights and the like were always met with a resounding, litigiously-tinged ‘no’. It was as good a wrap-up to the unexpected popularity of Joe’s work as they all could have hoped for.
“I think I’m going to take a break from writing for a while, Nile,” he sighed, after she told him that #RIPJaye and #MourningMalta had finally stopped trending on Twitter.
“You can try,” she chuckled. “Doesn’t really work like that though.”
“What do you mean?”
“Just that you can say you’re going cold turkey or whatever, but eventually something will come along and you’ll get sucked right back in… It’s the power of fic, man,” Nile told him sagely. “Good luck.”
“I’m sure I can manage,” Joe told her confidently.
(It was merely a week later when Nicky executed a truly impressive set of skills during an op while simultaneously spouting lovely words in Joe’s direction, and Joe’s first thought in response was “This would make a great fanfic”. It was then he realized that perhaps he did indeed have a problem.)
☽☉☾ ☉ ☽☉☾ ☉ ☽☉☾