Gossamer
The cracked stone of the front path is overgrown with weeds, but that's nothing new.
What is new is the ceramic plaque - once firmly anchored to the top of the doorframe - that lies cracked neatly in two on the stoop.
He bends to pick it up, ignoring the way the jagged edge of the fracture scrapes against his palm, and turns the pieces over to trace the finger of his free hand along the faded midnight blue lettering.
Not that he'd ever show it, but something in him aches with pain when he sees the way the glossy paint has chipped and faded. He remembers his father, in a rare sober moment, standing up on a chair with a rag in his hand to polish the plaque. His life was broken, his son scrounged clothes from dumpsters and giveaway piles, but he owned a house with his name over the door and God be damned if anyone forgot it. The man now standing half bent before the peeling door allows his frown to deepen fractionally at the thought that really, the little ceramic plaque was the only thing he had ever seen his father treat with any sort of reverence.
In a way, then, it's good that it's broken. It's about time he moved on. That's why he's here, after all.
The lock groans as the key turns, the door creaks when it opens. The broken plaque makes a soft thud and a dent in the dust when he lays it carefully on the mantle.
He mutters a quiet spell to light the half-broken brass chandelier, and by the steady but muted light he surveys the room.
More or less, nothing has changed. The large fireplace with the twisted iron grille, the heavy mantelpiece depressingly empty of pictures or mementos, the pale plaster walls - the warm orange paint long since faded to dirty cream, the tiny bookshelf crammed with ancient, never-read books.
The door in the corner is ajar, through it he can make out the shadows of the kitchen. Ahead of him, a narrow stairway - little more than a ladder - crammed between the bookshelf and the moth-eaten couch rises through a trapdoor in the high ceiling.
Everything is covered with a layer of thick, soft dust. He's thankful for that, because that's a difference between then and now, a gossamer wall between himself and the childhood he is afraid to forget yet wishes he did not have to remember.
A movement in the corner of his eye catches his attention. A cluster of bats, perched upside-down near the corner of the ceiling, stir fitfully at the invasion of the unexpected light. He smirks bitterly at them, more out of remorse than true amusement. His childhood home has become the wicked witch's cottage - abandoned, the garden overgrown and weedy, the paint peeling, bats in the rafters and cobwebs under the eaves...
And he is the wicked witch; hook nose, greasy hair, black cloak and all.
He always has been wicked, like it or not. He'd pretended to himself that his housing was because of his mother's family, but truthfully it was because of himself. He is clever and resourceful, good at lying and reading emotions and manipulating others for his own gain. He'd had to be, with a drunken father and a weak mother and a world that really couldn't care less about the strange poor boy in ill-fitting clothes. He'd learned to be a Slytherin not by schooling and money as the Purebloods of his house had, but by necessity and determination and despair - and he was better at it than they would ever be.
It had taken him years to decide which was more shameful - loving a Gryffindor, or being a Slytherin.
He climbs the ladder-stairs slowly, half-afraid of them breaking beneath him and half-uncertain of what he knows he will find at the top.
His little attic room, like the rest of the house, is much as he left it. A little more worn, perhaps, a little more empty, and with that same pale gossamer dust that forms the unbreachable wall between now and then.
He ignores the bed, the wardrobe, the threadbare rug. He barely spares the time to light the small lamp with his wand, his steps quickening as he approaches the desk. This is his reason for coming here, his final test, the last and most important thing he must do to let go of his past and be free.
He presses his wand to the rusted lock of the desk drawer, mutters a password he can hardly believe he still remembers, opens the drawer, peels away the concealment charms and reaches inside.
Just like that - a minute's wand work -and her letters are in his hand for the first time in twenty-three years.
He closes his eyes - just for a moment -and allows himself the slightest fraction of insecurity. Then he composes himself and takes in her words.
The letters are written in purple ink, and he smiles because one of the things he'd always loved about Lily - clever, practical Lily - was that she was not afraid to be whimsical. There is a flower (an iris, he thinks) pressed between two of the letters towards the end of the stack.
He lets his eyes skim across parchment after parchment, only halfway reading them at all. The letters are carefree, friendly, full of energy and life. Of all the things in this old, broken house - in his tattered, broken childhood as well, really - she is the only thing worth remembering, worth holding onto.
But this is an all-or-nothing deal. He will hold her in his heart, always, but it is time he let everything go.
Even her.
Especially her.
He lets himself read her letters one last time, lets himself laugh, lets himself cry.
Then he carries the bundle downstairs and starts a fire in the grate.
He burns them all, a few at a time, watches the way the paper curls and discolors and the way the ink runs. He even burns the flower. A part of him wishes he could cry at their loss, but his eyes are as dry as the dust that coats his knees as he kneels on the floor before the fire.
That evening, in his cold gray office, he signs the papers for the sale of the house. It's a terribly impersonal way to cast away his childhood, but he feels no stirrings of sentimental sorrow as he folds the crisp papers and tucks them into a clean white envelope. The only important release is already over, a last farewell sent up as smoke and ashes.
He stands and wraps his cloak around himself, brushing away strands of gossamer cobwebs - white with ash and dust - with hands that barely tremble, hardly betraying his turmoil as he briskly removes the last traces of his childhood home and steps smartly out the door.