Chapter 25 – the truth, at last.

lillyfielden.livejournal.com

@gottiewrites 20/10/14

Welcome back, guys. Okay. Hopefully the scavenger hunt to find this blog has thrown off anyone who shouldn’t be seeing this. I’m tracking the IP addresses of everyone viewing this.

I’ve been thinking about whether I’m going to leave the fandom now this is over, and I’ve decided that I’m not going anywhere. As long as the Loch & Ness fandom exists, I’ll be here. I still care about Rob. I still love Nathan. He isn’t dead in the fandom. There are enough fic and gif-sets and videos to keep us going for years and years. Even though RBC have announced that Season 2 isn’t going to air out of respect for Nathan, it’s likely there will be a digital release in the future.

In Loch & Ness, Rob isn’t a murderer. He’s our favourite boy, Jayden Ness, the way he’s always been. I know that version of him isn’t real, but when is a fandom’s view of their favourite actor ever real? It’s always an illusion, a constructed persona, an act designed to please the fans. How is this any different?

I’ve found that I can ignore the truth for the sake of my OTP. It’s like I’ve drawn a boundary in my mind between the fandom’s Rob and the real Rob. They don’t even feel like the same person anymore. Real Rob is going to prison, where he belongs. Fandom’s Rob is good and kind, and I am going to care about him for a long time.

Bias/personal involvement

For everyone asking me to admit that I was really Rob’s publicist trying to create drama in the fandom before the new season aired: I’m very flattered. RBC probably do owe me a few million dollars in back-dated publicity work. If I did work in PR, I would be doing either the best or the worst job ever.

The truth is, I’m not anyone special. I’m not a relative of someone in Management, or Nathan’s ex making up lies to try to ruin his image. I’m just a normal woman with a laptop. I have no insider connections to help me write this essay. (I mean, Christ, Nathan’s own staff carried on tweeting on his account because they didn’t realize he’d been murdered. Give me a bit more credit than that.)

But I do have some skin in the game, I suppose. A little bit.

I was @effiemeral. Back in 2010, on LiveJournal. I started following @silentwakes early on – he was huge in the fandom. Everyone followed him.

We were real, proper friends (I shared some of our conversations in Chapter 13!). When he posted for his fundraiser, I donated ten dollars to help him move away from his horrible parents. It really upset me when I saw that someone had given him thirteen grand – I wished I’d kept my money for myself.

That was why I was paying enough attention to notice that he was using a sockpuppet. But then @silentwakes turned around and accused me of plagiarism in a fic I’d spent months writing. I knew that he was lying but I had no way to prove it. I just panicked and deleted my account.

For years I tried to work out what @silentwakes had done, and why he’d come after me like that. It completely ruined Loch & Ness for me. I’ve still never written fanfiction again – I’ve stuck purely to the non-fiction, like this essay, and I stayed away from everything to do with Loch & Ness.

But then the TV series started and I couldn’t help myself: I watched the first episode and I was just – hooked. I had no idea then, of course, who Rob really was.

I was completely sucked back into the fandom. I looked up the names of the actors and followed them on social media. I made a Tumblr account, and I never told anyone that I’d been on LiveJournal years before.

I didn’t ship Lyra and Jayden anymore – it was obvious from the first episode that Jayden and Fang should be together. I started to suspect after a few months that they might be dating, and I became a hardcore Rob/Nathan shipper by the season one finale. I didn’t ever think about my experiences with @silentwakes. Why would I? This was about the TV series and not the books, and I’d left the fanfic site long behind me. Or so I thought.

Then one day Rob tweeted this in reply to a random fan:

@Rob_Hennings My dad was an old school sci-fi fan. I got the nerdy gene from him. I once caught someone plagiarising fic from an old space opera pulp novel from the sixties

Reading that tweet was like a blow to the heart. I was probably the only person out there who would remember the plagiarism incident. The only person who knew the names of the users involved. Because I’ve spent four years obsessing over what happened, knowing I was wronged but unable to prove it.

I couldn’t believe that @silentwakes was Rob Hennings.

I still had all of the old posts saved, so I started going through them, searching for any sign that @silentwakes, the person I hated more than anyone, was Rob – my Rob, beloved Rob, Rob who I’d been in love and lust with for months. (That’s where all the blog entries come from. My personal hard drive. You can’t access most of it online. I lied about that – no one sent anything to me.)

When I realised it was really Rob, I was furious. Completely livid. I’d always hoped that whoever @silentwakes was IRL, they had a terrible life. I’d wanted him to be completely miserable. That’s what I told myself, that he was probably some depressed, sad little internet dweller who never left their house.

But that wasn’t true. Rob was a famous actor. The “sexiest man of the year”! He was rich and popular and gorgeous.

It wasn’t fair. None of it was fair.

I was desperate to share the information online and get people as angry as I was, but I had hardly any followers. I knew that if I claimed Rob was some random LiveJournal user, it wouldn’t mean anything to them. They were only interested in one thing: whether Rob was dating Nathan.

So I started writing this essay. I made up a story about sitting in a coffee shop and seeing Rob deleting an email from LiveJournal with ‘silentwakes’ as the username. Then I could bring up the ring that Nathan was always wearing. I had to get people to care about who @silentwakes was, and I knew the way to do that was to discuss Rob’s relationship with Nathan. I needed to get enough followers so that people would take the @silentwakes narrative seriously.

I wanted the fandom to see that Rob / @silentwakes was a liar; that he’d faked that $13,000 donation. I wanted to prove @effiemeral’s innocence.

That was all I was looking for. I had no idea that Rob was involved in money-laundering or that he would kill Nathan over it. I never meant for him to be caught in the crossfire.

I wasn’t even looking for revenge. Not really. I just wanted the truth.

But I stand by everything I’ve done. I’m glad Rob was finally caught. He deserves to be in prison.

That’s it. That’s my big secret. That’s all I was trying to hide from you. I promise that if you try and investigate me, all you’ll find is a smutty Jayden/Fang Tumblr. I have no other secrets. No inside connections.

Everything you read here was found through hard work, through clicking link after link until the evidence slotted into place. This kind of stuff is out there about all of us. Our secrets aren’t really so secret, if you know where to look.

– gottie

P.S Has anyone else been watching that new MTV show, White Coats? It’s so good. The main guy with the hair is so cute! I need fic recs, please…

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Comments (10,756)

Anonymous this is so effed up. how did fans find out all this before the police?

krypto6661 CALLED IT. I totally knew that you were effiemeral! damn gottie. I don’t even know what to say. You sure are a piece of work, huh?

jonathanstrange I don’t know why I’m even still here. Everything she posts makes me so mad. Someone died and she’s just….carrying on reading fic about them? it’s gross.

Anonymous she reads fic about fang. They’re not the same person.

lilithfatale I can’t believe that Rob would do that. He loves Nathan.

Anonymous I wrote a fic. I can’t handle any of this.

We’re broken but we’ll fix it

Honestytbh

Summary:

Rob made a mistake. But he’s going to fix it.

Nathan couldn’t breathe. That was all he knew, when he came around. He tried to draw in a breath, and it hurt in the back of his skull, a deep throbbing pain. He drew in another breath, panicking this time. He felt dizzy and the sides of his vision were dark and blurry.

The last thing he remembered was Rob –

Rob.

“Nathan?” someone said, quiet and unsure.

He tried to speak, and a small noise came out that made him black out for a minute. He blinked, trying to open his eyes.

“Mm?” he asked.

“You’re awake!” Rob said, and suddenly there was a wet cloth rubbing across Nathan’s eyes, and cool liquid dripping into his mouth.

Nathan was lying somewhere cool and white. Rob was sitting next to him, one hand wrapped around Nathan’s arm.

“Are you okay?” Rob asked.

“Hurts,” Nathan said. He reached up to touch his head, but something tugged at the skin of his elbow. An IV. He dropped his arm.

“You’re on painkillers,” Rob said. “It’ll get better. Just wait for it to kick in.”

Nathan drew in another painful breath. “Wha – hap-”

Rob’s expression crumpled. “I’m sorry. I’m so sorry.” He curled over the hospital bed, resting his head on Nathan’s shoulder. “It was all my fault.”

Nathan made a noise, and touched Rob’s head with his free arm. His fingers felt thick and clumsy. He pushed them into Rob’s hair. Rob made a pained, horrified sound, deep in his chest.

“I’m so sorry, Nathan,” he said, in a choked voice. Nathan realised that he was crying.

He’d never seen Rob cry. Not even when he broke his toe in a mistimed stunt on set.

“Wha-” Nathan said, and then remembered, in a horrified rush. The fight. They’d fought. Nathan had been trying to call the police, and they’d shouted, and Rob had dived at him. He’d pushed him, and Nathan had fallen, and the back of his head had hit a golf club propped up against the wall, and –

Nathan pulled his hand from Rob’s hair, and touched his skull. The skin was sore and tender. He hissed.

Rob looked up at him, eyes red and damp. “I didn’t mean to do it. I just lost control.”

Nathan stared at him. He knew he should be angry, but looking at Rob’s miserable, guilty face, he couldn’t summon up the emotion. Everything hurt, and he just wanted Rob to hold him, to tell him that everything was going to be okay.

Nathan reached out and touched his cheek.

Rob collapsed against him, all tension disappearing from his body. “I thought I was too late. I thought I killed you.”

“Here,” Nathan said. “Love you.”

Rob sobbed again. “I love you too. I’m so sorry. I’ll never do anything like this again.”

Anonymous why the fuck would you write this? What the hell is wrong with you? THIS IS REAL. THIS ISN’T A TV SHOW. A real person actually murdered someone and you’re writing romantic fix-it fic about it? You can’t hurt/comfort your way out of this. Rob is a murderer and nathan is dead and it doesn’t matter if rob regrets it or feels guilty, because it happened and he should go to prison for the rest of his life.

tinyshaz where’s gottie? has she posted anything else yet?

gottiewrites password is the flower.

Anonymous password to what? What’s going on?

victoria the full stop is a link!!!

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