I feel like we don't talk about this sprite enough
This is the only time in the entire undertale series Sans stopped doing his goofy smile, and even then he's STILL smiling. His entire thing is reading people's faces to an absurd degree, believing that just looking at someone's face can tell you basically everything about them, so the fact that his face is always frozen into a grin indicates that he's trying to hide something.
Except for this single moment.
He knows he lost. He lost everything he cared about once, then lost it again. Sans drops the carefully constructed mask for a single second, and the only thing we see is shock. He knew he was the Underground's last chance and he blew it. This world will end without a happy ending, or even just a good enough ending. It ends because Sans failed.
Immediately after the initial shock, he puts the mask back up. He doesn't want us to see his deeper thoughts, to let us read him the same way he read Frisk oh so many times. Then he walks off screen, using the very little energy he still has left to make sure we don't get to see below his smile, below the mask he spent his entire life constructing.
The thing is, he's even hiding his true emotions in Deltarune, a time before he assumedly lost all hope. This isn't something he developed for us or the Underground, this is Sans, the Sans he wants everyone to see. He doesn't want to get deeply attached, he doesn't want to embrace his true self. He wants to wear a fake smile at all times and never let go. A lesson that Sans never learned, a lesson that's crucial to Deltarune, is that it's okay to not to smile...
This single sprite is probably the most emotion Sans has ever and will ever let slip to the player, to anyone, because to let anyone in would be to expose the Sans he doesn't want anyone to know about. The true Sans.
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