Reality Is a Lie

Authors Note

i know most people won't read this, which is fine! but either way i hope you enjoyed this 5 year long journey :3

first of all, HAHA SIKEEEE U ALL THOUGHT THEM SWAPPING WAS THE REALITY BEING A LIE HAHAHA I GOT U ALL!!! why be boring when you can just... not?

second of all, thank you to everybody who actually made it this far <3 i'm fairly certain all of my OG readers from like 2018 are gone by now which is fine but somehow i still have quite a few dedicated ones that read my updates every time (once a year) that i uploaded, so thank you all <3

special thanks to the person who commented on my fic vaguely recently telling me how much they loved it - you are genuinely my motivation for finishing this fic, and i love you for that <3

as i'm sure you could all guess, this will be my one and only sanders sides fic. it's my baby, but she doesn't need any siblings that's for sure. i probably won't post on wattpad again either, simply because i mostly use ao3 these days (if you're interested, my username is ignistae and i reuploaded this fic onto there so you'll know it's me lol) so u probably won't find me on here again.

i'm just gonna get sentimental real quick, but i honestly delayed writing the final 2 chapters for a multitude of reasons, one of them being i thought nobody was reading my fic anymore so i thought it didn't matter, but also because, as i've said, i started this fic 5 years ago when i was in middle school. i am a high school senior now??? for me, this is the final remnant of little middle school me, and i sort of didn't want to let that go. but, off he's gone! this fic has seen me through so many stages of life, and i'm eternally grateful to have written it. in fact, in a sort of weird testimony to the death of my childhood, i'm writing this (the epilogue + AN) the night before i turn 18! how strange! mostly unplanned but life works out like that sometimes :)

thank you everybody, i appreciate you all so much for reading! wish me luck in my finals :)

a few tidbits about the fic you might not have noticed/known!!

- names vs roles - virgil calls deceit janus when he likes him, and deceit as more of an insult/ term to distance himself. there are places where he uses them interchangeably, bc this is when virgil is angry at him/mildly annoyed with him (or i accidentally call him deceit bc he's always deceit in my head not janus LMFAOOO the pains of being an older fan 💔)

- foreshadowing - from the very beginning, i tried my hardest to foreshadow how all of this agreement nonsense was shady as fuck, and also how patton wasn't really the nicest guy, and deceit, though being a shady fucker, is a shady fucker who acts in their collective best interest, who cares (through the sarcasm)

also, can u tell i'm not a romance author? LMFAOOO i totally forgot about the romance aspect of this fic for ages T-T why did i even include it i can't write people in love???? ugh. sorry to anyone that had to read my attempts

also i didn't get to fully explain what the agreement was bc it would've flowed terribly if deceit had randomly given a fat lore drop in the middle of a tense argument like. it would've made no sense HAHAHAHA but tbh my notes about what it even entails are vague as fuck so like. not much else in there really the main point was that patton decided that to keep thomas as a good person all the bad parts had to be put away (if you've read jekyll and hyde then yeah a small reference here) so he split creativity (king creativity canon in this universe yes) and said "GET THE FUCK OUTTA HERE!!! BYEEE!" and deceit didn't really agree willingly, it was more "you either go or i exclude you so much (bc the whole influence on people's emotions and memories, he IS in fact the reason why Virgil hated janus even though he did fuck all) that you wanna leave anyways" so to protect his peace and have some time to plot he agreed to leave. 

crazy huh?

anyways, thanks again for reading!! it's kinda motivated me to write more so that's fun! i wish you all the best luck with whatever's in your future, and if you're reading this fic at 3am go to sleep rn you probably have school or work in the morning smh.

i love u all!! thank you!!