Into Your Gravity ( Luna Lovegood & Tom Riddle )

Chapter ten: Antinomy

"You're quite good at that," Luna said after a moment. "Were it a scored activity, I suspect you would earn the highest marks."

A vindictive thought skittered across Tom's mind even then, a desire to tell her that practice made perfect, to imply all the other women he had kissed besides her. He held his tongue out of fear that she would recognize his bluff for what it was and know that a kiss shared when one of the participants was manipulating the other, maneuvering for some alternative goal, was not the same as the thing they had just done. Instead, he settled for a frown-tinged stare, meeting her intrusive gaze and refusing to turn away.

"I have so many things I should like to tell you," she murmured, eyes out of focus even as she looked in his direction, as though lost in thought. She then turned her head, and her eyes landed on the violin on the ground. "Is this truly the best violin in the world?" she asked, stepping towards the black case and crouching beside it. Her fingers opened the clasps, and she lifted the lid to reveal the violin they had procured, the moon reflected in its highly polished wood.

"Yes," he said, not taking his eyes off of her fingers as she inspected the violin.

Picking the violin up out of the case, Luna held it in front of her eyes and stared down the strings, the way a Muggle stared down the barrel of a gun. "What makes it so special?"

"It is enchanted. It enhances a person's natural ability, magically enthralling its audience and keeping them spell-bound for the duration of its play. Those violinists who play it become known as the best violinists in the world," he replied. An anxiety was rising in him as he watched her handle the instrument. "You should put it down."

"The best violinists in the world," she repeated, appearing not to have heard the last part of what he had said. "Like Maximiliano." And now one of her fingers had strayed toward the strings, clearly about to pluck it to see what it sounded like.

In less than a heartbeat, Tom's long legs had carried him beside her, snatching the violin from her hands. "No!" he hissed.

Luna looked bewildered. "What? What's wrong?"

"You cannot play it," he admonished, turning away from her and placing it back in its case, snapping the lid shut with finality.

"Whyever not?" she asked. "Maximiliano made you swear you wouldn't let me play it. Why?"

Tom stood up from the violin case slowly, delaying the moment he would have to turn back to face her questions. He could already feel the way she had looked at him tonight, the way she had touched him tonight receding into the distance, replaced by revulsion before he even told her. He could already see her nose wrinkling with displeasure.

That critical voice inside him seized this opportunity to wriggle its way back to his consciousness. It whispered that his foolishness this evening was simply another reminder of why he should have always kept her at a distance. How weak he was to have let himself forget yet again. He steeled himself for her inevitable disgust, refusing any hope for another outcome, and turned to face her.

"The violin is not just enchanted to those who hear it. It is cursed to those who play it," he said, his voice taking on the clipped and cold tone it took with his enemies.

"Cursed?" she repeated. "But why?"

"Yes, cursed. Why is it cursed? Why is anything cursed?" Tom asked, his lip curling. "There was another famed luthier at that time, another wizard making violins, Giuseppe Guarneri. Today, his instruments are held in as high of esteem as Stradivari's, but while they lived, Guarneri lived in Stradivari's shadow. He learned violin-making from his father, who had learned from his father, who had apprenticed under the same master luthier as Stradivari had done. And, like his father before him, he was eclipsed by Stradivari's fame. He had to work as an innkeeper, making violins only on the side, because he could not support himself as a luthier alone.