His heart doesn't slow and his breath doesn't stop. Nothing stops. Until, abruptly -

everything stops.

Sans can recognize panic. He recognizes the hard lock of limbs curling taut around themselves, the way someone can no longer speak for the jangling in the nerves of their fingers and their legs and everything else. Maybe he knows the feeling, or maybe he knows something close enough to it.

It doesn't matter what he recognizes.

Because this isn't it.

It's a dragging rasp of breath drawn into his throat. A rumble of spluttering, respiratory agony. His lungs squeeze, and he begins to cough. He can't see. He can't see anything, can't feel anything, nothing but the hot-ping rattle of spikes up against closed lids and his fingers are too numb from the cold, too clumsy from the fatigue, to go scrambling through his pockets. His pockets, his pockets -

Where is it? Where is it? It was right here.

It was right

It was right here.

Stop, stop, stop, he'll be good he knows he'll ge good he promises he'll do better he'll do better but the rictus is already snapping tight over his muscles, arching his back, the incredibly intent and inescapable contracture of muscle over bone and the agony of everything drawing tight into the core of him.

Sans would be forgiven for thinking he isn't breathing.

The only sound he seems to be able to make is a wheezing, ragged hiss of someone trying and failing to draw breath.