"What's this one do?"
The Doctor jabbed at the left stick, and Yaz watched her character on the screen respond at once, jerking around on the grass in an erratic almost- dance.
"Use your thumb, I think," Yaz said, nodding when the Doctor slipped her thumb down instead, though the jerking motions continued. "It moves your character."
Yaz bit against the inside her mouth, very nearly suggested, once again, that Ryan might be a more fitting choice for this middle of the night activity. But the Doctor had come to her, had chosen to wake her at nearly two, and she'd looked so sad and exhausted and hopeful that Yaz had thrown on her dressing gown and followed her down the hall at once.
"And this one?" she asked, her thumb settling heavily on the left stick, her character promptly taking the short jog into the closest mountain crevice.
"You gotta look at the screen, Doctor," Yaz said.
The Doctor jerked her attention off her fingers, away from Yaz, shooting the screen and her character an almost apologetic smile. The movement stopped on screen, though her character remained nose-first in the mountainside.
"That one turns your camera around," Yaz said. "In case you want to look somewhere else."
The camera spun rapidly for a few moments, sky and dirt and sky again, and Yaz swallowed against rising nausea. The Doctor, at least, looked delighted with the ability to look in all directions as rapidly as she liked. She was probably envious, considering how she could implement it in reality, but Yaz was afraid to open her mouth to ask.
Finally, the spinning stopped and Yaz sent out a silent thank you to the universe.
"So what do I do, now?"
"You start down the path," Yaz said, watching as she started to work herself out of the mountain and back to the dirt path that led down into the woods.
"Like a good forest, me," she said, stopping short at a squirrel-like creature with a yellow bar in the distance. "This isn't a killing game is it?"
"You don't have to kill anything," Yaz said at once, thankful the Doctor hadn't plucked out one of Ryan's shooters instead of this one. "You can just build stuff. Go to that tree. There, and hit the bottom button. Right there at the front of your controller, and you'll chop the tree down."
The Doctor tilted the controller to look at the button, jabbed at a few times before the ax appeared and her character chopped down the tree with a few swift hits.
"Okay," she said, thinking back to the few slightly boring nights she'd kept Ryan company while he'd played, and felt thankful she could at least direct the Doctor in some aspects of the game. "You need to collect it. No, that button there."
She reached out, slipped the Doctor's finger over to the correct position, and felt her heart race at the look of delight that passed over the Doctor's often cloudy features.
"I could do that," she bragged.
Yaz rolled her eyes, but flashed a fond grin at her and reached out to grab the other controller.
"Here, I'll help you build your house," she said. "It'll go much faster with two."
"Video games with Yaz," the Doctor said, grinning her way before heading to the next tree, suddenly very able to control her movements.
By the time Ryan had peeked into the room, they'd built the first half of the house, and though Yaz yawned at the sudden reminder of the existence of time, though she knew there would be no stopping the Doctor's forward motion now that the boys were awake, she wouldn't have missed the last few hours for the sleep she would have gotten. The Doctor had bumped into her shoulder several times, had held out the controller for Yaz to correct her position a few too many times for Yaz to believe that someone so tech adept could have actually forgotten...but it had all been so nice. And maybe it meant something, and maybe it meant nothing, but that didn't seem to matter much when the Doctor had tossed their controllers behind them, scooped up her hand tugged her to her feet, with a promise of a planet where they served only breakfast. She paused at the doorway, squeezed her hand and her eyes said 'thank you' even her mouth couldn't form the words.
Whatever this was, it was enough.