John introduces his best human friend to his best troll friend. Maybe the three of them sit down to watch romcoms, maybe they're just hanging around a lab in the veil, but whatever the circumstance, Dave has trouble paying attention to the conversation at hand. Karkat is good looking and distracting and it's just not fair. Naturally, he begins distracting Karkat while John's talking. Little touches, lip licks, etc. Karkat gets flustered, Dave is thrilled, John is oblivious. It turns into a competition to see who can flirt the most without alerting John to their UST-fueled game.

"They just watch," John says, kicking the mop bucket into the broom closet after a hard day's asteroid-cleaning. "I guess chores are like a spectator sport for trolls? It's pretty weird! But... that's trolls for you!"

You are being the best boyfriend right now, right, and you're not even appropriating that word because you're only using it in your head instead of saying it out loud where Kankri could get upset. And it better be worth it, because you are so uncomfortable.

"I got you this." He sets a tiny box on the table between you and nudges it in your direction with psionics. You stare at it. It's the right size to hold a human-style commitment-designation ring, which you sometimes think would be a cool thing to have but as far as you know he's never been interested in. "For those times when I'm being a jackass and you need to snap me out of it." A little smile, a hint of the smug asslord creeping back in around the edges of the apologetic matesprit. "Or when you just want a shortcut to getting my attention."

Prolly if the two of you had handled this on your own, it woulda turned bloody real fast. You're guessin' neither of you woulda been willin' to let it go without the other one dead, and who the fuck knows what that coulda done to your two groups of friends. Now, you ain't gonna fuck shit up for everyone else if you can help it, but like fuck are you just gonna let Feferi Peixes have her own way. Not over your dead body, necessarily. But... maybe over hers. Lucky for the two of you, lil' Vantas McNubs is way too nosy for his own good. An' way too persistent. An' way too fuckin' precious to ever, ever hurt. It was gettin' real coddamn ugly the first time he jumped in between you. Feferi was just about ready to go for you, an' like shell were you lettin' her get away with that bullshit, an' both of you were there with your tridents out an' all, an' there's Karkat, just jumpin' in the middle like it ain't no thing.

The Golden Ending for SBurb has been realized and thanks to some careful time jimmying, everyone's ended up in the same timeline and the same present. Including the Trolls. Which can be a little, uh, complicated. Started out as wondering about a family of Striders that included Davesprite and Lil Hal and Alpha Dave, ended up expanding into a massive and strange thing of beauty. Includes an homage to Asukerian's one armed Davesprite with her gracious permission. These are written in whatever order we want but we promise to make sure they're put in mostly chronological order here on the series hub. (mostly because Time Shenanigans) CANON COMPLIANT UP TO THE GIGAPAUSE.

Care and fucking of your lispy bipolar nerd.

Sollux just wanted a tattoo. He came out of it with ten piercings and a threesome.