Tomarry One Shots

| Gaming buddies PT. 2

12/10/2015

"The stronghold isn't far, we only have to cross the desert East to us and then it's in the middle of the jungle biome."

"You should've made a Nether portal straight to it."

"It's barely a thousand blocks," Harry said with an eye roll. "I've already done the hard part of digging down to the fucking thing and marking the right path that'll take us straight to the portal. Come on, don't be a baby. You can't possibly die on the way there."

"Fuck you—what about if we die when fighting the dragon? We need a quick way to get back, you should've made a Nether route straight to it."

"Fuck," Harry grumbled. Tom was right, infuriatingly so. "Fine! I'll do that, but we've been waiting for half-term for weeks to beat the dragon. We will be doing it."

"Yes, fine, whatever," Tom mumbled, already looking through all the chests lining the storage room wall of their castle.

By then they'd been playing more or less daily for the last year and a half. They'd done everything there was to do in the game except beat the dragon and get the elytras from the End. Tom kept putting it off, and Harry wasn't entirely sure why.

They had a fully functional castle for themselves, with a wall around it holding in the villagers. Tom called them slaves, Harry called them prisoners—the bottom line was they were caged in against their will, and they both found it endlessly funny.

It was Tom who did the building. He knew how to create towers, and layer blocks to give them texture so they looked better. He'd also been the one to tackle redstone. A whole week spent in almost total silence as they played because Tom was figuring out exactly how it all worked.

He was so smart, and Harry had dutifully listened to him explain the intricacies of the setup of their automatic farms. Tom could go on for hours and hours if left unchecked, and Harry liked to let him just talk it all out from time to time. It was actually something Harry liked about him, he didn't need non-stop engagement. He was content for Harry to only vaguely listen and reply with one word every fifteen minutes. But something about that always made Harry give him his full attention, even if he didn't always understand what Tom was going on about.

Harry had finally gotten a phone for his fourteenth birthday, and Tom had been the first one to get his number. It had been so exciting, to finally get to share pictures with each other. An oddly nerve-wracking thing too. It didn't actually matter what Tom looked like, but Harry had been endlessly enthralled by the photo he'd gotten; Tom illuminated by the pink glow of his gaming setup, wearing an overly large pink t-shirt.

Harry kept the photo in the locked part of his gallery, and he sometimes just stared at it for a few minutes. He didn't understand why he was so obsessed with it, probably something about getting to see what his best friend looked like after knowing him for over a year without seeing him. But he memorised everything about him, from his shaved undersides and curly brown hair, to the way his dimples showed because of his closed-mouth smile.

For a week he'd secretly had it as his background, but he'd changed it after his dad had seen it, inexplicably embarrassed. He hadn't said anything, but he'd had a look about him, something that made Harry feel like it was something to be endlessly awkward about.

Getting a phone also meant he was no longer reliant on his Xbox to talk to Tom. They texted constantly when they were at school, and while Harry had only vaguely mentioned Tom in passing to his friends beforehand, they constantly teased him about him now.

Harry didn't mind, what he and Tom had was special.

"Okay, I've finished the pathway to the Nether portal that will take us straight into the portal room in the stronghold," he said, hours later by that point.