Glittering
Red
Zuko cannot feel his face anymore. The pain is gone, deadened by the morphine, and in its place comes a numbness in the area surrounding his left eye. The bandaging half-blinds him. But he knows that when the bandaging comes off, he will be able to see again. He will be able to feel his face again. He will heal, and he will return home.
There is a doctor on the ship just for Zuko. He removes the bandages from Zuko's face daily and inspects the skin there, sometimes smoothing on a coat of glistening red salve, the only thing that manages to elicit feeling in the damaged tissue. It stings like acid.
The morphine is administered in strong doses. The doctor refuses him the only mirror on the ship, and after hearing it so many times Zuko snaps.
He only wants to see his face healing. He wants to see time repairing him. When he heals, when the evidence of his father's mistake fades into memory, he will be able to go home. And no damn doctor is going to tell him otherwise.
Zuko cannot accept that his father has intentionally hurt him.
The doctor says the bandages cannot come off until the end of summer. The skin needs time to heal, he says. You will have to wait.
Zuko tells him that he is the prince and he has the right to see his progress, and the doctor says that he will wait until the end of summer. Zuko lunges, air stinging his raw face, loops of yellow cloth twisting behind him.
Iroh scolds him for attacking the doctor. He is only doing his job, he says.
The doctor is on the other side of the room, snipping off the burned hair as the scorched remains of the Fire Nation emblem settle on the ground behind him. Zuko does not reply as rubs his fingers over his knuckles.
He waits a month, enduring the doctor's treatments with dull silence. It is now high summer. The skin has had long enough to repair itself. He wants to see and feel again.
He ignores the small voice that tells him he is a fool.
He stays up late one night, waits until the crew has gone to sleep.
The kitchen is draped in a veil of darkness relieved only by a red lamp burning on the wall. He steps across the cold metal floor, and the footsteps clank even though his feet are bare and he is moving as though balanced on his mother's spine. Assorted pans hang over the stove. He selects one of the cook's pale saucepans, filling it under the water tap.
He returns to his room with the pan grasped between his hands. Water, red and glittering, sloshes over the sides.
The door thuds shut.
Sitting on his knees, he looks into the saucepan and reaches back to untie the knots securing the bandages. Untie, pull, tug. He shuts his eyes as the loops around his head slacken. Unwind the coarse cloth when no knots remain. It flutters into his lap.
He takes a deep breath and turns his gaze to the water's reflective surface.
My face.
The burn remains deep scarlet, as though blood has saturated the skin. The skin peels away from his forehead in stretchy, grimy sheets. His eye oozes sticky, yellow liquid. It lolls in its socket, useless.
He is deformed and blind.
The pan crashes into the wall, its red and glistening water spattering the walls as Zuko crushes his fists into the floor, howling at the cold metal ceiling above.