After spending half an hour with his skull pressed to the door, listening to Toriel rapturously describing the greater banded water snail, Sans knew what he had to do. He knew it would take effort, sure. But he was convinced he had seen a snail like that in Waterfall — and snails made Toriel happy. Why not muster himself up and try?
He hadn't gone snail hunting since he was a little skelly. Probably because it was hard. Reeds kept slapping Sans in the face when he tried to bend them back, and he slipped on slimy mud and fell into the river a couple times, and he had worn sneakers instead of slippers but even those were a soggy, squelching mess to walk in. Finally, he turned over enough rocks to find a moderately large snail with distinctive brown striations on its shell. Piece of cake. Well, no — knowing his talented friend, this snail was going to be a piece of pie.
Sans jammed the creepy crawly into a former ketchup bottle he had, uh, borrowed from Grillby's. Now, all he had to do was find a crack in the Ruin walls.
The next time he rapped phalanges on the door, Toriel's voice came bright and excited.
"Slime happy you're here, my friend! Do you know what happened today? I found a greater banded water snail!"
"Huh, what a coincidence." He grinned as wide as his skull would hold. "What'd you do with it?"
A pause. Then, as quiet as a guilty kid, Toriel said, "… Ate it."
"What?"
"I ate it."
"Right there?"
"Yes… I could not help myself! As I said, greater banded water snails make excellent pie — but that particular snail was delicious just the way it was."
All that work, all that tromping around in waterlogged shorts, for her to just cram the snail into her mouth. Resting his forehead on his carpals like a low-key facepalm, Sans was speechless for a one entire second. How could he forget that Toriel just kept surprising him?
"Well," he said, "sounds like you had a … shell of a treat."
She laughed behind that door, still quiet and tentative, still embarrassed.
"Hey," Sans added, "it's okay. Treating yourself is good for your … whelk-being."
There it was — the full peal of her laugh, that perfect sound that made Sans grin again and made the whole thing worth it.
Totally, completely worth it.