Frou-Frou 3000

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Only one thing matched the sweetness of a new love affair — a new broom.

He kept his on a hook in the locked broom room down by Hooch's office. He'd noticed the broom had a kind of sentience of its own, jumpy and hypersensitive to sounds, footsteps. It trembled like his heart did when he thought of Granger.

He went to visit it today with a pounding heart. (How Granger had kissed him yesterday, catching his wrist and pulling him to her. Her long hair surrounding their faces like wild grasses framing two flowers. Her kiss silenced his brain and his entire sense of self, even his name. Bliss itself.)

Walking into the broom room, Draco remembered that Ginny Weasley had a new Odysseus, made of olive. Bought for her by Potter. Draco's Frou-Frou 3000 was lighter, pure maple with a milder grain. Maybe he would ask Ginny if he could try hers later.

As he touched Frou-Frou, he felt her nervousness and her strength. From behind him he heard Ginny's voice: "She looks ready. Full of pluck."

Pluck — energy and courage. Draco turned around and smiled at the compliment to his riding. He liked Ginny, clearly also here to give her broom a bit of company and encouragement. Just as she encouraged him and Granger.

"You don't think it needs a little thinning down?" he asked, examining Frou-Frou's handle. Bristles long, neatly trimmed and bound together. Long, irregular scrawls of grain down her length. Not a perfect broom by any means, but a broom picked the rider as surely as the wand did.

Frou-Frou might have her natural flaws, but she was still a luxury broom. She had in the highest degree a key quality: that quality was blood, the blood that tells, as the English expression has it. Some objects only seemed mute because they did not have a mouth to allow them to speak.

To Draco, it seemed that she understood all he felt at that moment, looking at her.

Under Draco's touch, Frou-Frou began quivering subtly, the bristles bristling. Fidgety. "There, darling, there," he said soothingly to her. "You can quiet down." She grew more excited, then suddenly quiet, her trembling dying away.

Draco patted the broom, unlocking it from the wall with his wand, and ran his fingers over the maple grain. He moved his face near her, savoring the fresh new smell. The broom seemed to quiver and breathe again as he felt her, ribbons of light traveling up and down her surface.

Frou-Frou's excitement was inside Draco now. He felt his heart throbbing; he, too, like the broom, longed to move, to rustle, to race. It was both dreadful and delicious.

He told himself to calm down. "Just keep quiet before a match," he said to himself. "Don't get out of temper or upset about anything."

As he communed with the broom, the dark clouds that had been threatening showers all day broke, and there was a heavy downpour of rain.

As he listened to the raindrops outside, he thought about all the notes he was receiving, from all over. The same thing over and over again. Everyone — his mother, his father, his aunt — was chiming in on the affairs of his heart.

It all sparked a feeling of angry hatred. "What business is it of theirs?" he thought bitterly. "They can't possibly understand — all they see is that this is something different, that she's dearer to me than life. That's why it annoys them. Whatever our destiny is or may be, we've made it ourselves, and we don't complain of it," he said, in the word we linking himself with Hermione.

"No," he thought further, "they have no clue what happiness is; they don't know that without our love, for us there is neither happiness nor unhappiness—there's no life at all."

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