Work Text:
“Okay…,” Taemin mumbles, clicking through the settings of the new world he’s setting up for the pair of them. “Host privileges off… bonus chest on… world seed… did you want anything specific for the spawn?” he asks into the headset. He hears rustling in his headphones for a moment; Jonghyun’s probably still getting all set up over on the other side of the country.
“Um,” he finally replies. “Maybe like… horse adventure or something, I don’t know. Horse boyfriends. Yeah. That.” Horse boyfriends. Taemin laughs quietly, entering the words into the seed box. Hopefully it’ll give them a good world for horse adventures. They’re long overdue on the new updates. He finishes that, then flicks between the difficulties for a few moments before settling on easy. Neither of them really give a shit about the fighting anyway.
“Ready to start?” he asks, hitting the “create world” button and waiting for everything to load so he can invite Jonghyun.
“Wait a second,” Jonghyun says quickly. “I wanna tell you something first.” Taemin blinks. Well that’s a weird thing to say.
“What?” he asks. Jonghyun is silent for a moment, and then:
“I love you,” he says gently. Taemin can hear the giant ass grin in his voice. It makes him blush, the piece of shit, and he has to fight his own grin down before he can speak again. He knows Jonghyun can hear it in his voice anyway.
“You’re such a fucking sap.”
~
Taemin jumps around a nice, open grassland area with a lake to the left, a jungle to the right, and a village to the north. It’s as good of a location as they’re going to get without exploring the entire world first. He figures they’ll do that later, when they have their noble horse steeds to ride on.
“Wanna build a house here?” he asks, looking around for Jonghyun.
“I wanna find some horsies,” Jonghyun says. Taemin watches his little Thor character sprint off into the grassy distance with a roll of the eyes.
“We need to build a house, first,” he says. “How are we supposed to keep horses if we have no stable?” Or a farm with wheat and carrots? Maybe he’ll build them a barn. That sounds fun, fuck. Jonghyun is still running around like an asshole out in the wild, though, even though there aren’t any horses close by.
“I wanna find some horsies and tame the horsies so they love me and then ride the horsies and give them nametags and make little horsie babies.” Now he’s just jumping in circles in the middle of a group of flowers. Fuck, he’s so fucking cute. Taemin is almost tempted to let him go on and look for horses, but they really should get started on a house first.
“We’ll do all of that,” he says. “We have to get a bunch of shit first, though.” Like a house. He can build it and Jonghyun can start a little mine for better equipment, like they usually do. And maybe he’ll even find some horse armor in a dungeon or something. “Come on,” he adds, with only a tiny little whine in his voice. He hears Jonghyun chuckling his soft little laugh as he comes back to where Taemin is standing.
“Fine, fine,” he says. He takes out a sign and plonks it right in the middle of the ground. “Build it right here. And don’t move this sign.” He finishes writing and grabs a shovel instead, heading off towards a little hill in what Taemin assumes is a search for a good place to start a mine. He moves to look at the sign himself and see what Jonghyun wrote.
“Bootie Shaq.”
It takes Taemin another five minutes to start on their house because he’s laughing so hard.
~
“Shit--shit--shitshitshit--”
“You okay?” Taemin asks, not really taking his attention off of the placement of his bricks. This is the cutest fucking barn on the planet that he’s making right here and he doesn’t want to fuck it up.
“Um,” Jonghyun says in a way that tells Taemin that he’s absolutely not okay down there in his mine. “Can you come find me?”
Taemin stops in his artful brick placement to sigh, and also giggle.
“Where are you?” he asks, heading back into the Bootie Shaq to exchange his building shit for some extra mining shit Jonghyun left in one of the chests. It hasn’t been that long since Jonghyun last made a pit stop up here. He can’t be too far.
“Um,” Jonghyun repeats, slower this time. He sounds muffled, like he’s rubbing a hand over his mouth in that way he does when he’s embarrassed. “Follow the torches and take three right turns and you’ll find me by a dungeon with a zombie spawner.” Hmm. He just got a little overwhelmed by a mob. That doesn’t sound too bad. Taemin will just help him beat down the zombies and go back up. “Bring a pickaxe,” Jonghyun adds quickly, before Taemin makes it out of the house. Taemin snorts. The one he’s using is probably almost broken.
“‘ll be right there,” he says, going back to the chests to grab the pickaxe. Once he gets down into the mine, he takes some time to really appreciate how nice Jonghyun’s made the area. Very square. Very clean. Very maneuverable. He follows the torches and takes three rights until he hears some zombie assholes groaning around and the creepy dungeon sound. This must be it. He takes out his sword and creeps slowly forward until he turns into the dungeon and three zombies. “Yo, I’m here,” he announces, starting to whack at one that comes at him. “Where are you?” He assumed that Jonghyun would be helping him out here, but he’s nowhere in sight.
“Um,” Jonghyun says for the third time. “I’m… trapped.”
“Trapped?” Taemin asks incredulously. Where the fuck could he--a second zombie falls under his sword and he sees. He sees where Jonghyun is trapped. He’s in a fucking mess of cobblestone, random blocks placed all around a crude little shelter. There’s one block missing from the awkward jumble, and that’s the one that Jonghyun is peeping meekly out at him from. What the fuck, Taemin thinks. “What the fuck,” he says.
“My sword broke and there were five zombies and I was almost dead and I couldn’t get to the entrance so I just tried to box myself in so they couldn’t get me but then my pickaxe broke when I was trying to give myself more space and now I’m stuck,” Jonghyun whines, all in one big, pouty breath. Taemin takes a moment to really comprehend the details of that chain of events, and then he takes another to close his eyes and breathe a deep sigh. Holy shit, he’s in love with this loser. He bets he’s fucking adorable right now, all wrapped up on his couch and pouting over the hem of a turtleneck. He’d love to be there with him to pat his little head.
“You’re incredible,” he mumbles, and he only means that with like, five percent malice. He kills the last zombie, then lights up the spawner so no more come and switches to his pickaxe to break Jonghyun free of his self-imposed prison. Jonghyun bounces around him, bumps into him, and throws a rose he must have picked over an hour ago at his feet.
“Thanks, bae,” he mumbles. There’s a tiny little smile in his voice.
Taemin smiles himself.
~
When Jonghyun next comes up out of his mine, Taemin is nearly finished with their house-slash-barn-slash-totally awesome mini minecart race track.
He may have gotten a little bit distracted with all of the extra iron Jonghyun brought up before.
He follows Jonghyun into the house, smiling at how Jonghyun praises how nice the place looks. It does look pretty rad, Taemin has to say. They have art and flowerpots and cute interior decor that took him like, ten minutes to get just right. Plus the farm is way more organized than Taemin usually bothers to do, because he wanted to make up for all the time he wasted making the minecart tracks. And there’s still one more thing that he spends another solid five seconds debating on whether or not he really wants to show Jonghyun.
“Where are the beds?” Jonghyun asks suddenly, looking around their house.
“Oh, um,” Taemin says, wincing because this is it. “I moved them upstairs.”
“There’s an upstairs?” Jonghyun asks, sounding mildly impressed. “You’ve really been doing a lot up here.” He finds the staircase and bounces up it, Taemin following meekly in his wake. There’s a chance he won’t notice. Taemin can still back out of it and save himself an hour’s worth of cringing. “Aw, is that the rose I gave you earlier?”
“Yeah, that’s the one,” Taemin says, following Jonghyun upstairs to see him looking at the little flowerpot Taemin put next to their beds. “And, um….” Fuck. He’s so bad at this. This was such a bad idea. He can feel his face radiating enough heat to power a small country and he hasn’t even told Jonghyun about the thing yet. “There’s, um, a really nice view,” he says quickly. Jonghyun hums in question and hops up onto the beds to peer out of the windows Taemin set above them. It’s silent for a few moments and Taemin drops his controller to put his face in his hands. Fuck.
“Oh my god,” Jonghyun says, and fuck. Taemin doesn’t even want to look at it again. He’s ashamed of what he did. He’s ashamed of himself. He can’t fucking believe himself. He peeks through his fingers to find Jonghyun still looking out at the grass below, and the red roses planted in the ground that spell out “I <3 U.” It’s disgusting. It’s sappy and cheesy and so sickeningly fucking sweet that Taemin is sure he conceived like, ten cavities while he was doing it. He’s never going to forgive himself, but….
“Oh my god. I love it. I love you. Fuck, I love it, I love it so much,” Jonghyun squeaks.
Taemin knew he would.
~
“I think,” Jonghyun mumbles as he stares into a chest, “that we’re pretty much ready?” He closes the chest and looks up at Taemin, who’s busy watching a stack of potatoes cook in the furnace. “You’re all stocked up on food, right?”
“Yeah,” Taemin says, taking what’s done of the potatoes and adding them to his inventory. “Did you make leads out of all the slime and string you got from underground?” It took them like half an hour of fucking around in Jonghyun’s caves down there to find one slime; he better have made the leads by now. They can’t have mighty horse steeds if they’d just wander away.
“I did, I made like five in case we accidentally lose some. And I have nametags too, so we can name our horsies.” Jonghyun has all of the horse shit, Taemin has food and beds and extra stuff so they don’t die… he thinks they really are ready. They’re gonna go on a totes swaggin’ horse adventure. “I want a white horsie,” Jonghyun says dreamily. “LIke a mythical fantasy pure white being of goodness.” He sighs a happy little sigh and bounces to the front doors, stopping just before the pressure plates to wait for Taemin. Of course he wants some angelic ethereal horse. He wants the horse that matches his fucking soul.
“I think I want a cute light brown one, with spots,” Taemin says. He’s always liked cute light brown horses. With spots. He steps up to Jonghyun’s side in front of the other door. They like to both leave for grand adventures at the same time, bursting out of their front doors like anime protagonists on the beginning of long harrowing roads of character development and shitty, badly translated jokes. He pretends that they’re actually holding hands as Jonghyun starts their countdown. He wonders if they’ll ever do this in real life when they live together and represses an ugly snort.
“Alright, three--two--one!”
Taemin’s thumb slips on the stick and he fucks up the sprinting thing like he always does, so Jonghyun rockets ahead of him out of the door--but apparently, it doesn’t even matter. Jonghyun stops almost immediately right outside with a startled, confused little noise, and once Taemin finally manages to get his ass out there, he understands why. Literally right in front of the Booty Shaq are two horses: one pure white, the other light brown with dark spots, both of them rearing up on their hind legs and neighing into the glorious orange sunrise.
“I mean… oh,” Jonghyun mumbles. Taemin feels pretty much the same.
“Talk about anticlimactic,” he says. Ugh. He’s so disappointed. Going out and finding his own horse was what he was looking forward to the most. He’d been seeing the horses from the plains in the distance slowly making their way closer to their house during their time out here, but still. He wonders if Jonghyun would want to just… ignore these two and go looking for another pair of perfect horses. If it takes forever, they can just come back to these. He scoots forward absently and gets onto the brown horse; it fucks around on the grass for a few seconds before throwing him off. This is no where near as fun as it should be. Jonghyun just kind of throws a saddle onto the ground for him.
“It was cinematic though, at least,” he offers. Taemin snorts as he hops onto the horse again.
“I guess,” he says. Jonghyun gets onto the white horse; Taemin baps him in the face before his horse throws him off again. He giggles at the disgruntled little noise that he gets.
~
Taemin is happily equipping his new light brown horse with spots with her diamond armor when Jonghyun jogs back outside to greet him in the farm again. It took like, half an hour and a highly unnecessary amount of gold, but he succeeded in breeding himself a new, even better horse down from their original two. He feels much less disappointed by this one. He hops off of his horse and attaches her lead next to Jonghyun’s original white horse just as Jonghyun finishes struggling with the fence to their pasture.
“Finally done?” he asks. Taemin can hear the amused little smirk in his voice and humphs quietly. Excuse him for wanting to actually work for his horse.
“I’m satisfied, yes,” he says snootily. He rummages through his inventory for the nametag he customized earlier as Jonghyun laughs softly and throws something at him.
“Congratulations,” he says. Taemin picks it up; it’s a cake. Aw.
“Hey, thanks,” he grins. He was wondering why Jonghyun went all the way back into their mine to bring some buckets back up to the farm. He needed the milk to make the cake. Taemin plops it unceremoniously onto the ground, then eats a few slices since he’d been getting low on food while he wasted time out here breeding horses. Then he turns back to his horse and puts her nametag on. The name pops above her head, official and custom, and he’s never been more satisfied over a digital horse in his life.
“Mystery?” Jonghyun asks, skepticism heavy in his voice. Taemin nods, then remembers that Jonghyun can’t see on the other side of the fucking country and hops onto Mystery again.
“Yeah, like… weesnaw,” he says. He grins and smothers a giggle in his hand as he thinks again of that one Spongebob episode. He catches a muffled snort through his headphones; it sounds like Jonghyun tried to cover his mouth so Taemin wouldn’t hear. He humphs. It’s a great name. Better than Jonghyun’s, anyway. “You named your fucking horse ‘Egg,’” he snaps.
“Yeah, and you love it, you meme loving fuck,” Jonghyun shoots back. Taemin stays quiet because he can’t deny that. He’s laughed at Jonghyun’s horse’s name every time he saw it since he’s been out here. He loves when Jonghyun does things to make him laugh. He’s really good at it.
~
This is great. This is so great. This is the greatest experience that Taemin has ever had. Their horses are so fast and Mystery jumps so far and Egg has been neighing majestically at just the perfect moments and their map is so, so great for horse adventures. Everything is nice and open with sweet jumping opportunities and the larger bodies of water are easily avoidable. They’re moving along the border of a promising looking jungle biome and towards a village they can see in the distance when--
“CAT,” Taemin announces, suddenly and loudly. A noise comes from his headphones that he assumes is Jonghyun being startled at his sudden outburst; he half-ignores it and immediately gets off of his horse. “Kitty,” he coos, crouching to move slowly and inching towards the ocelot that’s peeping back at him through the vines of the jungle.
“What are you gonna do with a cat?” Jonghyun asks. There’s exasperation in his voice and when Taemin glances over at him, he’s stopped his horse and is hopping impatiently in the grass.
“They keep creepers away,” he says. He slinks even closer at a rate of one inch an hour, wary of the ocelot running away. “Also, they’re really cute. Have you seen the black cats?” He knows that Jonghyun has seen the black cats. They’re fucking adorable.
“You don’t even have any fish,” Jonghyun says.
“Says you,” Taemin snoots back. He has plenty of fish. Like, two stacks. He has enough fish to tame a hundred kitties, and it only took him an hour of fucking around over their lake. Hopefully he can find another ocelot and tame both so he can breed more cats than either of them will ever need. Jonghyun can’t say anything about it. He has like ten wolves back at the house. “Come here, kitty,” he coos at the ocelot. It creeps forward slowly, carefully, and Taemin waits for the perfect moment to feed it a fish. “Love me,” he whispers, giving the cat food and watching the negative black poofs above its head, waiting for the hearts to take their place.
“Alright,” Jonghyun says. Taemin doesn’t look at him this time because moving at all will probably scare the ocelot away. “I’m gonna keep going to the village. You stay here and drown in pussy.”
“Fuck.” Taemin bursts into giggles, accidentally nudges the analog stick, and watches helplessly as the ocelot runs away.
~
“Do you think two emeralds for three cakes is a good trade?”
“Why do you have three cakes on you?”
“No, they’d be giving us the cake.”
“Oh. Then fuck, yeah, get some cakes, are you kidding? That’s a great trade.” It’s times like this that Taemin really wishes they were moved in together already, so he could give Jonghyun a look that details exactly how offended he is that Jonghyun actually had to ask that question. Instead, he does what he can and puts as much emotion into his voice as possible. In reply, he gets what he’s sure is an exasperated sigh. He bets there was an eye roll to go with it.
“We can just make cakes ourselves,” he says. Taemin snorts as he lays his minecart tracks artistically through a cluster of cacti in the desert. He may or may not have veered way off of the main course between the Booty Shaq and the village Jonghyun is at to get to the cacti, but that’s something that Jonghyun won’t notice until the track is already done. It’s also something that Taemin won’t even bother explaining if Jonghyun asks, just like the fifteen cats he has following him around while he works.
“It’s such a hassle, though,” he mumbles. Cakes are like, the most complicated food to craft. He doesn’t who who it was that made the decision to have them need three buckets of milk, but he’d like to send them a strongly worded letter about what a shitty idea that was.
“I made a real cake from scratch the other day,” Jonghyun says then, hums it into his mic like they’re talking over morning coffee. “Did I tell you?”
“Yes, Jonghyun.” Taemin shakes his head with a sigh that’s part exasperation, part fondness. “You’ve told me.” He’s told Taemin at least thirty times. He’s proud of him , really, but he just… doesn’t care anymore. He cared the first ten times, but those were all in the same day.
“I made the frosting from scratch, too,” Jonghyun grins. Taemin laughs softly. He’s cute.
“You’re cute,” he mumbles.
“I know,” Jonghyun replies. Under his confidence, Taemin hears a tiny hint of flattery.
~
Taemin can’t for the life of him remember how to make coal blocks. He frowns at his screen, looking through every single thing on every single crafting menu with growing frustration. He knows that they’re here. He just wants to burn some fucking cacti to make green wool for some carpet. This is ridiculous. It’s not even worth it anyway. Blocks are only like ten percent more efficient or something. After fucking around in the menu for another minute, he exhales in disgust and gets out of the menu. Fine. Whatever. He’ll just cook this cactus with regular lumps of coal like a fucking pleb.
“It’s getting kind of late.”
“Hmm?” Taemin pauses in his grumbling to look up from the furnace and at the sky. Jonghyun is right; the sun is almost setting on the horizon. The monsters are going to start appearing soon. Taemin doesn’t have a problem with them, but Jonghyun likes to sleep through the nights anyway because it’s less of a hassle. “We’ll sleep in a little bit,” Taemin tells him. “I wanna finish this first.” He hops in front of his furnace impatiently while his cactus burns. He’s going to get his dye, damn it, and his kitties are going to have the cutest little house ever.
Once it’s finished, he grabs it and hops upstairs to join Jonghyun at the beds. Jonghyun is standing in the windowsill, staring out at the love message of roses outside; Taemin blushes like he’s done every time he’s walked passed it and hits Jonghyun to get his attention.
“Hey, c’mon, let’s sleep,” he mumbles. Jonghyun obliges with a knowing little hum that makes Taemin blush even darker.
~
realjonghyun90 suffocated in a wall while trying to escape skeleton.
“Fuck.”
“Dude, what?”
“What the fuck happened?”
“It says you suffocated while running away from a skeleton.”
“How the fuck did I--? I didn’t even see a skeleton! I was mining and then I was just dying and just--what the fuck?”
“You okay?”
“I had so much fucking shit, oh my god.”
“Want me to help you go get it?”
“No, I was right next to lava, just…. What are you doing up here?”
“I’m making a kitty house.”
“You... are adorable... in the most obnoxious ways.”
“Hey, thanks.”
“Can I help?”
~
“Babe….” Taemin swears he can almost feel Jonghyun leaning up against him and sighing that word in his ear. He turns his headphone volume down just a little bit before he gets too into it. He keeps placing glass windows in the kitty house (Pussy Shaq is what Jonghyun wrote on the sign half an hour ago) and hums to show that he’s listening. “Babe, I’m getting tired,” Jonghyun pouts.
“Ahh, what?” Taemin asks. He wasn’t expecting that. “It’s not even that late.” It’s three hours later for him and he’s not even tired yet. Jonghyun makes another little pouty noise and Taemin really thinks he should switch back to his old headphones with the shitty static.
“It’s almost nine,” Jonghyun whines. “I told you before. You know I don’t like staying up late.”
“It’s not--what?” Taemin blinks away from his tv screen and squints out of the living room window; it’s dark as fuck out there. He fumbles to check his phone for the time and gets even more confused when he sees that it’s almost midnight, like Jonghyun said. “What the fuck,” he says. He thought it was like, seven. This game really fucks him up. It dawns on him that when Jonghyun said that it was getting late a while ago, he meant in real life and not the game. Shit.
“I’m gonna go to bed, okay?” Jonghyun says. “I love you.”
“Mmm,” Taemin hums. He’s suddenly feeling sleepy too, like the time is catching up with him now that he’s realized it. He rubs his eyes, yawns into his mic, and ignores the way Jonghyun laughs at him. “You too,” he says. “Sorry I kept you up.”
“Promise me you won’t stay up much later?” The worry in Jonghyun’s voice makes Taemin shift a little guiltily. He has been losing sleep lately, despite Jonghyun’s nagging.
“Okay,” he says. He thinks he’ll just finish up this kitty house before he heads to bed as well. Another ten minutes, tops. “And you, don’t forget your pills.”
“I won’t,” Jonghyun sighs. Taemin huffs at his sigh because he did forget last time. He’s just trying to make sure here. “I love you,” Jonghyun murmurs again. That one makes Taemin smile.
“You too,” he repeats. “Sleep tight.” Jonghyun makes a pleased noise, and then makes a kissie noise into his mic before he goes offline. Sappy little shit. Taemin stares fondly at the little “realjonghyun90 has left the game” on his screen. He saves and quits soon after that, too tired already to finish his kitty house tonight. As he’s crawling into bed and wrapping himself up in his blankets, he closes his eyes and imagines Jonghyun giving him real sleepy goodnight kisses. What a wonderful thought.
He dozes off with a smile on his lips.