III. The fire sermon
or, FIGARO, MAGNIFICO

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"You have a pianist's hands."

The doctor had a way of saying things that always sounded like an irreversible insult. What Gokudera didn't understand was how the same thing had been said to his mother and it was the brightest of praise. He glared at the man.

The dynamite was a slightly modified one from the standard-issue explosives, made lighter and suitable for fighting. He rolled one clumsily in his grip. He held it dangling from the fuse. Shamal snorted and pulled it away from him, flipping it lightly as he did so, and catching it between two large fingers. The thing fit in between them, a missing member.

"What a lame answer! Why can't I get a sword, or little remote-controlled daggers, why'd I have to get...FIREWORKS."

The doctor's eyebrow arched ever so slightly at the last word, but the childish contempt was naturally forthcoming. It was true, the boy had as-yet small hands, but their strength and dexterity for such an age was due to the pieces the boy played on his instrument. A sword would have been too cumbersome for him, and fistfighting was for hands better used to curling inward into themselves defensively.

That was the boy's problem, Shamal diagnosed (and he was precise in his science) early on; the need to stand out, the need to be flashy, to do things with a bang.

Well.

The boy stared outward to the port, where they could see it from the veranda of the mansion, where the ships came to dock at the violet hour. It was warm enough now at least to stand outside against the sea, and the thawing rains had decreased their presence in the south. He was glaring now at his own hands, which he spread outwards, fingers splayed; he would do the same thing years later when, in a forest clearing with barely any practice bombs left to work on, he wondered how he could possibly achieve great things with such small, mid-ranged weapons?

But of course this sheltered mafioso's son wouldn't understand. A bomb in one's possession meant protection, but to Gokudera, these were simply the ugly origins of the pyrotechnics that bloomed above the Teatro after a major opera. This boy went to sleep to the lullaby of the city's finest musicians, not to neighborhood talks of invasion. Throwing a bomb in the doctor's old Turkish village meant you controlled the distance between yourself and your opponent, and the explosion that followed covered the footfalls of one's retreat, one's attack.

Shamal would have to take a different strategy, show the boy that what he already had––his music––was perfect for what he would soon learn how to master.

"You have a pianist's hands," the doctor said again, meaning that the boy would make a dangerous art of this, that the bombs would not simply be just a tool for survival. "Long fingers, like candles. Which means you'll understand the handling of this weapon fairly well."

Gokudera's eyes went wide as Shamal raised his hands, a maestro before his skeptic audience. Dynamites tucked between his fingers like the half-notes on a keyboard, he released them with a sudden jerk of his arms, and music erupted in the thin air of the evening.