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Jonghyun is really starting to think that he shouldn’t have turned all of that lava into obsidian earlier. He could be using a pool of lava outside of his little mining house right now to get rid of all of this excess crap. LIke really, why the fuck do they put so much redstone in the game? At least it’s good for experience. Maybe he could just dig a little hole somewhere in his safezone so he can throw everything down there and not worry about accidentally picking it up later.
For now, though, he just needs a new chest, and he frowns at the fact that he doesn’t have one yet. Taemin was supposed to go back up and get more wood like, five minutes ago, and he still hasn’t returned. It doesn’t take that long to chop down some trees. He wishes they could be playing together on a split-screen or something instead of online and on the other side of the country. Ahh, well. It’ll happen eventually. He closes the chest he was sorting things into and clicks on the controller to look behind him. Nothing should be able to get into his iron door, but he still hates being surprised by monsters.
There’s no monsters there, but there is Taemin, in his weird ass (cute ass) Tree Man skin, crouching and standing back up again quickly behind him. Jonghyun sighs.
“Taemin,” he says patiently into his headset, “what are you doing?”
“What?” Taemin’s voice says through his headphones, his character standing up straight one last time and stepping back. “Nothing, nothing.” He was absolutely doing something. He was pretending to hump Jonghyun’s character again. If he had a dollar for every time he’s caught Taemin doing that, he’d be able to buy a plane ticket to fly over there and see him in person. He shakes his head fondly.
“Where’s the wood you said you were gonna go get me?” he asks, turning around and inching forward to peer at Taemin accusingly. Taemin giggles softly and turns around to go back upstairs, probably to go do what he was supposed to be doing in the first place.
“I’ve been giving you wood,” he mutters, and he’s probably grinning like a huge fuck. Jonghyun sighs again.
~
Jonghyun likes exploring.
There’s just something so satisfying about spelunking through caves, following lava pools and filling them up, mining every ore he can find. He likes to look back and see nice, entirely explored, nicely shaped, well lit rooms, and know that he didn’t miss anything important. He doesn’t really talk much while he’s doing it, but neither does Taemin, so it’s a comfortable silence where he can just focus on his work. It’s nice.
What’s not so nice is when he gets swarmed by monsters--like right now, as he struggles to beat off four spiders and a zombie with his almost used up iron sword. They must be by a fucking dungeon or something. His sword breaks as the zombie falls and he curses softly, backing up and batting at them with his fist.
“Fuck--Taemin,” he says, wincing as he gets hit three times in a row. “Help--fuck--” He sprints through the spiders into one of his passed caves, looking around; Taemin is nowhere to be found. “Where the fuck--Taem--”
He dies.
“Fuck,” he hisses, frowning as he stares at the death screen, at all of his stuff just strewn around his dead body as the spiders wander around aimlessly. He hits respawn and appears back in their house; Taemin is there, looking at him amusedly.
“Spider, huh?” he asks, and Jonghyun knows that he’s cocking a brow. He humphs, going to a chest by their beds to get a spare set of armor.
“Why the fuck are you up here?” he grumbles. “I needed you.”
“I got bored,” Taemin whines, and when Jonghyun gets out of the chest, he sees Taemin walking outside. “You know I’m more of a crafter than a miner.” Jonghyun rolls his eyes. That is true, he does know that, but--
“At least tell me, next time, okay?” he grumbles, following Taemin outside. “And what have you been crafting, then?” he asks, curious. Taemin jumps a little bit outside, in front of their house.
“I’ve been making it pretty,” he says happily. Jonghyun turns around to look at their house; before, it was just a simple oak wood cube plonked on the grass in a clearing, but now, it’s actually looking pretty nice. Taemin’s added a porch, some windows, a fence, planted trees, flowers, added vines… it looks like a cute little log cabin in the woods. He even added a little moat that circles the house, with lilypads and little viney bridges.
“Huh,” he says, walking around and looking all over. “It looks really good,” he grins, and Taemin jumps some more, bouncing over to bump into Jonghyun.
“Thanks,” he chirps. Jonghyun wants to kiss him.
“Come help me kill those spiders really quick, I think I was by a dungeon,” he says instead, and the bubbly way Taemin agrees just makes him want it more.
~
Jonghyun stops himself just before he dumps water over a lake of lava to turn it into obsidian. He has a better idea. He crouches and slowly, carefully, builds himself a little platform right to the middle of the lake, then builds up a few blocks and changes his view so he’s looking at himself from the front.
Thor, standing in the middle of a lake of lava, emerald and gold ore speckled behind him, holding a diamond sword.
“Fuck yeah,” he mumbles, swinging his sword a little bit and dry humping the air.
“Hmm?” Taemin hums from wherever he is up on the surface. Jonghyun grins, spinning in circles on his little pedestal.
“I look really cool right now,” he grins, jumping proudly. “I’m--”
He slips right off of the pedestal and into the lava.
He doesn’t even say anything when Taemin is there to judge him at the beds again when he respawns.
~
“Do you want a baked potato?” is what Taemin asks the next time Jonghyun comes out of the mine. He pauses, confused; he turns to look at Taemin, who was building him a nice little staircase out of the mine when he came back.
“A what?” he asks, and Taemin looks up from his building to look at Jonghyun.
“A baked potato,” he says. “They restore like, five food I think.”
“Baked potatoes are a thing?” Jonghyun asks incredulously, following Taemin back to their house. Taemin leads him through the main room, with the beds and chests, and then through another room that definitely wasn’t there before, and finally behind the house, where he’s set up a whole farm. Melons, pumpkins, wheat, cacti… everything. There’s even a little sign that says “Please keep off of the crops.” “You’ve been busy, haven’t you?” he grins. Taemin bounces over by another furnace he built at the back of the garden.
“Yep,” he says. “I went and raided all the villages around here and took their crops, stole their libraries, went through their chests. The usual.” He turns away from the furnace and throws a stack of something at Jonghyun; Jonghyun picks them up curiously. Baked potatoes. Huh. He never knew about those.
“Cool,” he says, eating one to restore his food. “You didn’t take all of their crops, did you?” he asks reproachfully. Being nice to video game characters is always an important thing to do. Taemin scoffs, stepping up close to his face.
“Of course not, I’m not a barbarian,” he snoots, and then walks away to harvest some sugarcane. Jonghyun snorts.
“Okay,” he says, eating another baked potato just because. “Hey, will you make me baked potatoes when we move in together, too?” he asks, following Taemin around and getting into his way.
“Shut up,” Taemin replies, giving him a smack that only takes away half a heart. Jonghyun grins because he could hear the smile in Taemin’s voice.
~
“Hey, how do you change the instrument a note box plays?”
Jonghyun has to stop his sloshing around down in a cave he accidentally flooded to hear the end of Taemin’s sentence.
“What?” he asks, frowning as he looks around at the mess he’s made.
“Note boxes play different instruments sometimes, right?” Taemin asks. He sounds frustrated. “How do you get them to play piano notes?” Jonghyun snorts. Where did he even get a note box?
“Piano, I think, has to be like… on top of nothing? Or everything but the regular blocks?”
“...What,” Taemin says after a moment. Jonghyun sighs.
“I don’t know, just… I’ll come up there and do it really quick. This cave is pissing me off.” He frowns one more time as his watery, misshapen cave and swims back out to his tunnel, then sprints all the way back to the house. When he gets there, Taemin is standing by the door to the house, hitting a note block and having the wrong instrument play.
“I want it to be like, a little chime when we walk inside, you know, like at stores and shit,” he mumbles, switching between two note blocks on either side of the door. Jonghyun grins, laughing softly. That’s cute.
“You’re cute,” he says, and Taemin makes that grumbly noise he does when he blushes.
“Just fix it, please,” he whines, retreating into the house to go do something else. Jonghyun grins and surveys the situation; if he’s remembering correctly, he just needs to change the block that the note block is on top of. He beats a hole into the floor next to the blocks, then gets rid of the wooden planks underneath each of them. He pauses, and then digs down one more layer so he can put the note blocks on the same level as the floor. It looks cooler that way, he thinks. He fixes the floor back up and hits the note blocks; they play quiet little piano noises and he smiles.
“I fixed it,” he says happily. Taemin makes an excited noise and comes sprinting back over; he walks in and out of the front doors a couple of times, giggling when the note blocks chime in welcome.
“Thanks, Jonghyun,” he says, and then tosses something at his feet. “And here,” he adds. Jonghyun picks it up; it’s a brand new diamond pickaxe with high level enchantments.
“What,” he says, awed and confused. “Where’d you get this?” he asks, replacing his old iron pickaxe with it. He used the last of the diamond on his sword and they don’t even have an enchantment table.
“I went to go trade with the villagers and one of them just wanted four raw fish for it?” Taemin says, like he doesn’t really get it either. “I guess they just really liked sushi.”
Sometimes, Jonghyun thinks Taemin is the luckiest fuck on the planet.
~
“Fuck,” Taemin says just as Jonghyun mines the last piece of gold in this wall. “Shit--stop fucking--guh.”
“You okay?” he asks, hopping back into his hallway and placing a torch on the wall.
“Yeah, yeah, I’m--Fuck,” Taemin hisses again. “No, I’m--fuck--fuck--”
“Nanaman was slain by silverfish” pops up in Jonghyun’s bottom left corner. He snorts unattractively and tries not to giggle too much. He wishes he could be back at the house to leer at Taemin when he respawns like Taemin always insists on doing to him. Or, better yet, he wishes he could be there next to Taemin so he could see his cute little grumpy face.
“Shut up,” Taemin grumbles.
“How the fuck did a silverfish kill you?” Jonghyun asks. He’s trying not to laugh. He really is. “Where did you even find silverfish?”
“There were like, twenty of them,” Taemin whines. “I found a stronghold and I was trying to bust through a wall to find the library and they just started attacking me.” He sounds so sad and dejected; he’s almost definitely pouting over on the other side of the country.
“Oh, bae,” Jonghyun says, not entirely managing to keep the laugh from his voice. “You poor thing.”
Taemin just humphs.
~
Jonghyun was not prepared.
He was not prepared at all, holy fucking shit.
“Fuck--fuck--zombie--pigmen--fuck--there’s like seven of them,” he screeches, backing away, trying to fight them off, and dodging around the fire and lava pools littered over the ground all at the same time. Like, he knows that when you attack pigman, all the others in the area attack too, but there were not this many at first. He knows, he fucking checked. He manages to kill one, starts whacking at the next, when suddenly, he bumps into the little fortress he made around his Nether portal so ghasts wouldn’t detonate it. “Yes, fuck--” He barely manages to get inside and block the doorway off with a heart and a half left. “Jesus Christ,” he mutters.
“You okay, warrior guy?” Taemin asks, and he’s smirking, the fuck, Jonghyun can hear it in his voice. Still, though. He made it. He escaped. He scuttles back through the portal and appears in the little room Taemin made for it.
“Yeah,” he mumbles. “I’m back at the house.” (He pretends like he didn’t hear Taemin just snort.) “I need better equipment, fuck,” he says. “Can I have your diamond armor?”
“But, Jonghyun,” Taemin whines. “It makes me look cool.”
“You don’t need it to farm, bae,” Jonghyun whines right back. “Please? I brought you all of those emeralds to trade with the villagers.”
“Guh. Fine,” Taemin grumbles, coming into the house and finding Jonghyun. He does look pretty snazzy in all of that diamond. “You can enchant some of it too. I made an enchantment table with all of the books I got from the stronghold.” He tosses his armor at Jonghyun.
“Oh, sweet,” Jonghyun grins. He’s got levels to spare on enchantments. Taemin bounces and leads him to the room he put the anvil and brewing stand in, which has a new little corner made up of bookshelves. “Can you save, like, in case I get something shitty like aqua affinity?” he asks.
“Sure,” Taemin says, and the screen changes, telling Jonghyun to wait while Taemin saves the game. “Just as long as you don’t beg me to restart like ten times like you always do trying to get the best enchantments.” Jonghyun scoffs. He does not do that.
Seven restarts later, and he’s starting to think that maybe he does do that.
“Just--one more, please, bae?” he asks, bouncing all around the enchantment room.. Taemin sighs heavily.
“Fine,” he grumbles, and Jonghyun really wishes that he could kiss all over his face in thanks. He makes an embarrassing kissie noise into the mic instead as he gets kicked out and then reinvited back to the game.
It’s worth it later, when he’s got high level protection and fire resistance on all of his armor, plus infinity arrows and high level power on both his bow and his sword.
~
“Hey. Psst. Taemin.” Jonghyun inches forward, bumping against Taemin as he wanders around the outside of his animal farm, chucking eggs at the ground in the hope that they’ll hatch into baby chickens. Taemin hums tiredly in reply. It’s getting late over there on Taemin’s side of the country; he thinks they’ll stop playing soon so Taemin can get his sleep. For now, though, Jonghyun peeps in front of Taemin and tosses his gift at his feet. “Here,” he says. Taemin picks it up and looks at it.
“A potion of night vision?” he asks, confused. “It’s like, the middle of--”
“Because you light up my life,” Jonghyun says happily. Taemin’s silent for a moment, and then he breaks into laughter, soft chuckles and little, endearing gasps of breath. Jonghyun bounces happily around him, pleased with himself.
“You’re a loser,” Taemin mumbles, but Jonghyun sees the potion in a little picture frame later, above Taemin’s bed.
~
“Hey, bae, how much diamond do we have left?” Jonghyun asks, following his nice, organized trail of torches back up to the entrance of his mine. Taemin doesn’t answer right away, so Jonghyun assumes he must be checking to see, but when he gets all the way back inside of their house, Taemin isn’t by their diamond chest. He frowns. “Bae?” he asks, looking around the house, He finds Taemin in front of the furnace in the garden, just standing there, looking at thirty-seven finished baked potatoes. “Taemin?” he says softly, and when Taemin doesn’t reply a third time, he laughs softly. He must have fallen asleep.
Yep--if Jonghyun listens hard enough, he can hear soft breathing, the occasional tiny snore. The poor bae. He takes Taemin’s potatoes out of the furnace and puts them in their food chest for him, then finds some signs to place in front of him. He has to try a couple of times on each sign (He’s not exactly wide awake either), but he finally gets a nice little message to Taemin, split across four signs: “You fell asleep, bae, sorry...” on the first, “...I kept you up so late. Sweet dreams...” on the second, “...If you wake up go back to sleep...” on the third, and “...Love, Jonghyun <3” on the last. Taemin’s probably going to call him a loser again.
He can’t wait to be there next to him and be just as embarrassing and affectionate in person.