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[fulllifeconsequences]

Speak.

[Wow okay cool voicemail there Chara. Voice/text/video away to your heart's content.]

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[fulllifeconsequences]

[They find it by accident. It interrupts the familiar, practiced slide of reaching for the knife that hides between the mattress and headboard, stops their hand before it can reach down and seize a handle.

...Kitchen.

It's been a while.

This copy is new. Not the tremendously dog-eared copy they once had, worn out from being read cover to cover, marked up with circled and underlined passages that they had read and reread until they could recite them word for word.

For just a moment, they wonder if this is Sans. If he somehow took a bitter quote about being filled with leaden hopelessness and tracked it back to its source, just to unnerve them. But... no. That's far too much effort for a guy like him. Frisk certainly never heard a word from those pages, unless you counted a moment where they gazed over the cauldron of hell.

Only one person, then, who it could be.

They settle silently down on their bed. Do not reach for a knife, but flip through the pages until they find a line they know.

The room is empty, but they read out loud. It's hard to remember, sometimes, that they can speak and be heard. That they aren't a blur of thoughts whispering in Frisk's ear, but something that existed before Frisk fell. But the locket (not a Heart Locket, The Locket, it's special for them and not for Frisk, it's theirs) is warm and beating against their chest, and they remember its weight with every word they utter.

It, too, is proof. You're someone who gets presents. You're someone who has a friend. You're someone real, someone who belongs, someone who would be missed.]

I wanted to say, "If there's anything I can do, just say so," but I stopped myself. I silently implored: May the memory of this moment, here, the glowing impression of the two of us facing each other in this warm bright place, drinking lovely hot tea, help save him, even a little bit.