White (Original link)

Author: Kirschreich
Rating: T
Characters: Zuko
Genre: Angst

The room is white.

The walls, the floor and the ceiling are white. The curtains and his bedsheets are white, too. The bandages on his arms are white. So are the ones covering half of his face.

But Zuko is not white. Zuko is burned red and black. He is a stain in the pristine white room just as he is a stain on his father's pristine white life.

Which is why he has to go. Something so purely white is not supposed to be stained. And if you can't wash out the stain, you have to find another way. Ozai has cut out his stain. It leaves a hole, but he prefers it to the stain, apparently. Zuko wishes he were in another's place. In his mothers.

Then she could be lying here and the room wouldn't be pristine white, but filled with flowers and get-well-soon balloons and candy and people coming to visit. All those things his father threw out of the room because Zuko didn't deserve them.

If he were dead, Zuko is sure his father would still love him. But he's alive and lying in a cold, white room covered with uncomfortable white sheets and his father hates him.

He is not allowed to have visitors. His father forbade it. The doctors argue that Zuko needs to see a psychologist at the very least because he suffers from trauma (it's been 9 days and he can still feel himself clutched against his mother's body, can still smell her blood and the ashes, feel the heat eating away on his face, feel his mother's ragged breathing in his hair, still hear the screams), but his father forbade that, too. It's his punishment. So is being sent away.

The perfect white around him makes Zuko sick. So sick, that he is infinitely relieved to find that under all those white bandages, he bleeds red.

Eventually they strap his arms down so he won't continue to scratch himself bloody and drug him with some bitter sort of M&M to keep him in a stupor. Zuko is grateful for that because whenever his father comes to yell at him, the M&M doesn't let him understand what it is and all he can remember afterwards is his father's angry face. That alone is almost too much to bear.

When Iroh finally comes to visit and make plans about Zuko's future, he takes only one look at the boy strapped to the bed and begins to cry.

A distant part of Zuko wants to cry, too, but mostly, he marvels at his uncle's tears, the gentle hands that cradle his face and the shaky voice that promises him that he'll make it all better.

Through his drug-induced apathy, Zuko can barely summon the will to believe him.