Briar sat with the ruined device for three more days before he finally, properly let it go. He did not decide it all at once. It arrived instead the way most honest realizations did, slowly, in pieces, across quiet mornings spent staring at the same cracked crystal lens without any longer feeling the familiar hot climb of determination to fix it, and by the fourth morning, he found himself simply looking at the whole cluttered workshop, the diagrams, the components, the accumulated wreckage of two weeks' obsessive effort, and feeling, for the first time since break began, something closer to tired relief than frustration. He was not going to build a device that made his gift into something it wasn't. He understood that now, plainly, without the particular bitterness he'd expected the acceptance to carry. His foresight was two minutes, a handful of seconds, once an hour, and no amount of copper wire or careful crystal lensing was going to change the fundamental shape of what his soul had actually given him. He could refine his understanding of it, perhaps, learn to use those brief seconds more wisely, but the gift itself would remain, stubbornly, exactly the size it had always been. He found, turning the thought over one final time, that he was, mostly, alright with that.
He began packing the components away, not discarding them, some quiet part of him unwilling to fully abandon curiosity even now, but setting the whole project carefully aside for a future that didn't need to arrive on any particular schedule, and left the workshop for the first time in days without the accumulated weight of failure following him out the door. He found Bevan near the groundskeeper's shed, splitting firewood with the particular unhurried efficiency of someone who had performed the task so many times it required no conscious attention at all.
BRR: I'm giving up.
Bevan looked up, setting his axe down without any particular alarm at the announcement.
BVN: On the device?
BRR: On the device. On the whole approach, really. I've decided my soul is exactly as large as it's going to be, and I'm done trying to argue with it.
BVN: How's that feel?
BRR: Better than I expected. Worse than I'd hoped. Somewhere honestly in between.
Bevan nodded slowly, considering this, and wiped his hands on his trousers.
BVN: Sounds about right, for something like that. Come on, then.
BRR: Come where?
BVN: I've got a rabbit stew waiting on the fire in my quarters, and considerably more of it than one old groundskeeper needs. Figured you could use a proper meal that isn't bread and cheese eaten standing over a workbench.
Briar, realizing with some surprise exactly how long it had actually been since he'd eaten anything resembling a real meal, found himself agreeing without much internal debate. Bevan's quarters sat at the edge of the academy grounds, small and cluttered in the particular comfortable way of a space lived in for many years, and Briar sat at the modest table while Bevan ladled out two generous bowls of stew, the rich smell of it filling the small room pleasantly.
BVN: Eat. You look half starved.
BRR: I've been busy.
BVN: Busy and starved aren't mutually exclusive, unfortunately.
Briar ate, and found, somewhere in the simple, satisfying business of a proper hot meal, the accumulated tension of two weeks' obsessive effort finally, genuinely beginning to loosen.
BVN: So what's the plan now, then? Since the device is shelved.
BRR: I don't know yet. Maybe I write to Yseult eventually. Maybe I don't. Maybe I simply accept that two minutes an hour is what I've got, and find clever ways to use it instead of clever ways to force it into being something bigger.
BVN: Sounds like a reasonable plan to me.
BRR: You would say that. You're the one who suggested it.
BVN: I merely asked a question. You're the one who's spent two weeks arriving at the answer the hard way.
He said it with a small, dry smile, and Briar, despite everything, found himself laughing, the particular relieved laughter of someone who had finally set down a weight they'd been carrying considerably longer than was strictly necessary.
BRR: You know, for someone with, and I quote, not much of a gift, you've been remarkably useful this entire break.
BVN: I told you. Different things entirely, gift size and usefulness. Glad you're finally starting to believe me instead of just nodding along politely.
BRR: I wasn't nodding along politely.
BVN: You absolutely were. I've watched enough students nod along politely to recognize the specific quality of it.
They continued through the meal in easy, comfortable conversation, Bevan recounting some genuinely absurd story about a previous student who had once attempted to grow a garden of carnivorous plants in the academy's western courtyard, with results that had apparently required considerable groundskeeper intervention, and Briar, listening, laughing properly for what felt like the first time in weeks, found himself grateful, in a way that went considerably beyond the simple warmth of a shared meal, for the particular quiet, patient friendship that had somehow found him across an otherwise lonely break.
BRR: Thank you. For all of this. The lunches, the meals, the ridiculous stories. I don't think I would have made it through this break in one piece without you turning up in my workshop uninvited.
BVN: Wasn't uninvited. You never once told me to leave.
BRR: I suppose I didn't.
BVN: There you go, then. As invited as I needed to be.
He refilled Briar's bowl without asking, the particular unassuming generosity that had defined the entire break, and Briar, sitting in the small, warm quarters with a proper meal finally settling his hunger and a friend's easy company settling the rest of him, found the whole difficult, obsessive, ultimately unsuccessful stretch of the past two weeks resolving, quietly, into something he could genuinely call, without reservation, good enough.