Work Text:
“What could go wrong?” Zed said jokingly to himself as he worked on lowering YoYo the pig into the void below the lightning rod.
He should have known better than to ask that, but knowing something was a bad idea had never stopped him.
Attaching the lead to the fencepost, he watched the animal dangle just into the void, not yet far down enough to take void damage. Zedaph shivered, ever where he was, kneeling on the bedrock, he could feel the chill of the void.
He really hoped he didn’t fall in during this.
It’s not like getting struck by lightning was fun, but it’s quick and it’s an easy respawn. Falling in the void, on the other hand, was the opposite. It’s like freezing to death with added suffocation, and it’s quite slow, and it sucks to respawn from.
Climbing down onto YoYo, he held tightly to the lead, not wanting to fall. Now that he's established that he could get down there, he went to ender pearl back up, and he missed, the pearl hitting the side of the bedrock and slamming him into it, and he wasn’t able to grab on before he started falling down into the depths of the void.
Zedaph fell out of this world
Tango heard his communicator ding, the tone he had set for death alerts. He picked up the device and opened up the game chat and just stared at the message for a minute.
Zedaph falling into the void wasn’t exactly surprising , but usually he let him and Impulse know when he was planning to die in the void so that they wouldn’t worry, and Tango hadn’t heard anything from him that day.
He quickly put away what he was working on so nothing would get messed up and then immediately took off over to Zedaph’s base. He made it there faster than usual, burning through more rockets than necessary, but he was worried. He landed down in the center of the pit that was Zed’s base and spun around, finding the other curled up under the covers of his bed, shivering, a cat curled up on top of him.
“Zed!” He rushed over to him and rested a hand on his shoulder.
Zedaph was cold. He was shivering so hard it felt like he was going to shake out of his skin, and he clutched tighter to the blankets, curling in on himself. He thought he heard rockets, and then someone called his name and there was a hand on his shoulder.
“What happened?” he heard Tango ask.
“Fell in, accident. Wasn’t expecting it.”
Tango could tell that was the truth because Zedaph was smart enough to have a warmer place set up to respawn in if he’d expected to die in the void. He stepped away to dig through some of the chests nearby and exclaimed “Aha!” when he found a stack of soft blankets piled up in one.
Zedaph felt something being layered over him and opened his eyes to see that there were three more blankets piled up on top of him than there had been before. He also saw Tango standing next to the bed and he forced himself to move, inching over to one side of the bed so that the netherborn could slip under the covers with him.
Tango was like a space heater, his nether genetics making his temperature run much higher than the average player’s. Zed immediately curled up against him, trying to warm the one deep chill that the void had left behind.
His skin and his bones had been aching from the cold, and it had felt almost as if there had been a layer of frost covering him.
Tango wrapped his arms around him and he relaxed, melting into the heat. He shivered still as he began to warm up, but it didn’t take very long for that to stop.
Pretty much as soon as he had warmed up enough to stop shivering, he started to feel tired and heavy.
Tango could see Zedaph's eyes drifting shut as his shaking finally stopped, and he pulled him closer, and said, “Go to sleep, whatever you were doing can wait ‘til the morning.”
Zedaph was tired and that was all it took to convince him. He let his eyes close and rested his forehead against his friend’s collarbone, and once he’d let his eyes drift shut it only took a few minutes for him to fall asleep.