A/N: Reading the first two installments of this series may help to place Zuko and Aang's relationship in context, but it is not necessary. The timeframe for this series is approximately thus:

grey eyes, silver lining: late 2019
Tl;dr: I love you: January 2020
Pillow Talk: February 2021

Though the opening is fairly light and fluffy domesticity, this is a pretty heavy piece dealing with anti-Asian sentiment in the US, and furthermore in a medical institution setting, inspired by recent hate crimes against Asians. Please note that Zuko uses sarcasm as a coping method at times, and his apparent self-loathing diatribes should not be taken at face value. Due to the extremely personal nature of this piece, it is less artful and well-rounded than my usual writing, but I had to get it out there.

Content warnings for: anti-Asian prejudice and discrimination. Unexpectedly coming out in a semi-public setting—there's not technically any homophobia involved, but I guess this kind of situation could be triggering for some people.

This is the life, Aang thinks blissfully as he settles back in the bathtub. The steamy water is topped with lavender bubbles, and nestled in a plastic container floating between his knees is Teapot, Zuko's cat. She always mewls so pitifully outside the bathroom door, so he solved the problem by bringing her into the bath with him. She loves it, wide eyes lidding to slits, a soap bubble cap piled atop her head. Everything's perfect.

He considers this statement. Technically, this situation could be improved with Zuko's presence. But his beloved surgeon is working late today (when is he not?), so Aang's paradise must remain incomplete. He briefly ponders snapping a selfie with Teapot to send to Zuko—does that constitute sexting? He spends a few minutes debating the premises of professionalism before hearing the front door open. Hm, earlier than expected.

"In here," Aang calls. This saves him the trouble of taking the selfie with wet hands, how serendipitous.

Zuko's footsteps approach the bathroom, heavier than usual, and he doesn't speak for long moments even after appearing in the doorway.

"We were just waiting for you to join us."

Finally, a minute smile quirked in acknowledgement. "I'll pass. It's been a long day; thank god my last few didn't show or it would have been even longer."

"Oh, Zuko…" Aang pats the towel on the edge of the bathtub, inviting him to come sit and chat. "Do you want to talk about it?"

"It's alright. I don't want to burst your bubble." Zuko turns to head into the kitchen. "I'll heat up some dinner and then go to bed, I think."

It's 7pm on a Friday. Teapot mrowrs plaintively at her human's retreating figure. Aang sighs, the delightful bath somehow much less enticing than it was earlier. It's not like Zuko hasn't come home depressed and sluggish before, worn out by the impossible demands placed on a hospital surgeon during a pandemic. But despite Aang's efforts to console his gloomy surgeon and elucidate the true nature of his stressors, he remains overcast and downtrodden of late, unable to snap out of this fug. It keeps Aang awake at night sometimes; god knows Zuko is so tired every day that no manner of stress can keep him from falling asleep next to his insomniac boyfriend.

No, I can't get complacent. He launches himself from the bath, spraying Teapot in droplets and eliciting infuriated screeches. He liberates her from the plastic tub and dries himself frantically. Zuko needs him, even if he won't always say so.

Zuko doesn't look up as Aang sidles into the kitchen. He glares numbly at his food spinning in the microwave, one listless finger drumming on the countertop. Excellent—an opportunity for Aggressive Demonstration of Love #1.

Aang enlists a mango for this operation, peeling it methodically as Zuko eats like an excavator peeling up dirt for a construction site. Scoop food, spoon in mouth, chew, repeat, doubt he's even tasting any of it. Aang slices the peeled mango, wrestling with the pit—what an inefficient fruit, to have such a large, inedible seed. He slides it in front of Zuko just as he finishes his plate.

"Dessert," he says simply, brooking no argument.

"Thanks."

Zuko doesn't like people to hover when he's feeling less than 100%, so Aang doesn't. Instead, he goes into the bedroom and drags the comforter off the bed, along with Zuko's pillowcase and his favorite pine-scented dryer sheets, and pops them into the dryer: Aggressive Demonstration of Love #2.

Thirty minutes later, Zuko's done with his mango and is now in the bathroom getting ready for bed. The dryer is also done, the bed now cozily warm and fragrant, a balm against the February chill and seasonal depression.

Aggressive Demonstration of Love #3: letting Zuko go to bed early and not coming in until two hours after the fact. He aches for his love, heart and soul, but he also knows that Zuko needs space, and that if he doesn't want to talk about what's bothering him, there's no use pushing the matter. He'll come around when he's ready.

Which is why Aang is surprised, ten minutes after Zuko gets in bed, to hear his beloved calling for him.

"You don't have to… do all these things for me, you know," Zuko says, avoiding Aang's eyes even though they can't see each other in the dark. It's easier to say what he doesn't mean under the trappings of insincerity.

"I know I don't." Aang's hand finds one of his own and threads their fingers tightly together, a lifeline on a stormy sea. "That's why you never say anything in return, because you think that I'll feel obligated to coddle you, and you don't think you deserve that kind of love."

A beat of silence, like the first golden moment after a searchlight drifts over those survivors thought to be lost at sea. "Well shit," Zuko says at last. "You didn't have to lay me bare like that."

"Did something happen at work?"

"Everything happens all the time at work every day," he says as superlatively as possible. To answer the question he knows Aang meant, "Yes."

Aang's thumb rubs a line back and forth on his hand, inviting and soothing both.

"It's…" He doesn't know where to start. Fortunately, Aang does. Aang always knows.

"Was it tumor board today? Zuko, I'm sorry, I shouldn't have—"

"No, no!" he interjects hastily. "Don't you ever apologize for that."

It was a simple misstep. Tumor board had been conducted virtually via Zoom since the beginning of the pandemic last year, and Zuko was in the habit of fondly watching Aang's cheerful square on the screen vividly annotating digital slides of a cancer resection, explaining what criteria had caused it to receive a certain tumor grade and what that meant for the patient's prognosis, etc. About a dozen other attendings and residents from surgery, pathology, and radiology involved in the patient's care would also be on the call.

Zuko and Aang happened to share a patient whose case was presented this morning and tuned in from their respective offices. He'd spent five minutes of bliss listening to Aang expound upon extramedullary pheochromocytomas before concluding his section of the case. "And now I'll turn the floor back to Dr. Sun for the rest of the patient's clinical history."

"Thank you dear, that was a lovely explanation."

"I love you too," Aang said cheekily. The exchange took place so quickly and naturally that Zuko nearly forgot that 1) other people were on the call, and 2) they're not officially out to all their colleagues.

Zuko hesitated just a little too long before resuming his spiel, long enough that listeners who had tuned out during Aang's talk noticed and rewound the last few seconds of their short-term memory to realize—wait, Dr. Sun and Dr. Carroll are dating? Breaking news! This'll make the front page of UCSF surgery department's Reddit page for sure! /s—Zuko imagines, embittered.

"It's honestly not such a big deal."

"It obviously is if it's been bothering you all day," Aang retorts. "But I have a feeling there's more to it than what you've told me."

Teapot, who's been hiding under the bed until now, chooses this moment to leap up and nuzzle in between the two of them, purring loudly. He distracts himself briefly petting her with the hand that's not entangled in Aang's.

"It wasn't even really directed towards me, and certainly not with any open animosity." He hesitates over his words, tongue loathe to give voice to his ordeal, as if that will make it realer than it was in the moment. "After tumor board, I went to the outpatient resident clinic. I stopped right outside the workroom to answer a text from the department chair, and it was just like in a poorly scripted TV show: the door's ajar, the subject of the conversation eavesdropping outside, and in the room, a couple of surgery residents were gossiping about our newly outed office romance." He laughs ironically.

"Let me guess: it was Jason." Aang's lips curl in disgust at the thought of his least favorite surgical chief resident who, from Zuko's anecdotes, seems to make a habit of mistreating medical students and junior residents.

"No, Jason's graduated to fellowship at Stanford already, but good guess. It was Nicholas and Brandon, a couple third years; I don't think you know them. They were just carrying on like—" He imitates one of the residents' lazy drawl: "'Oh yeah, I could have guessed they were together, Dr. Carroll's always coming into the OR when Dr. Sun's operating even though he could just stay in the basement and wait for the tumor specimens—'"

"Excuse me, pathology's on the sixth floor; we're a progressive department. We have windows and everything," Aang interrupts, piqued at this insult to his noble profession. "Radiologists are the basement dwellers."

"Yes, I know." There's the faintest hint of amusement to his voice; Aang will take his small victories where he can find them. "But the residents hardly ever visit the gross lab, so they wouldn't know where it is. Anyways… I didn't mind it too much, they didn't sound like they were bashing us for being together. But then one of them was like, 'It's kind of interesting, you know; usually Chinese are pretty socially conservative, especially guys; they're like, super insecure about their masculinity.' Or something stupid like that."

"…wow."

"Yeah."

Between them, Teapot has fallen asleep. Her snoring takes on its usual high-pitched, whistling quality which had earned her her name (technically, she should have been named Tea Kettle, Zuko reflects after the fact, but he's too lazy to research how much it costs to alter cat birth certificates).

He toys with her tail, basking in that tiny sliver of normalcy, avoiding the dropped thread of the conversation until Aang prods him into picking it up again.

"What did you do after that?"

"I went to my office and started reviewing patient charts," he says matter-of-factly. What did you think I was going to do, storm in there and confront them? "I only intended to stop by the resident room to drop off midyear feedback papers for Jin."

"Jin was in there too? And they still said all that in front of her?" Aang sounds incredulous, and rightly so. Jin Chen is another of surgery's promising third year residents, well known to Zuko for her amiable personality and willingness to do whatever thankless scutwork other residents would normally relegate to students.

"Well of course they did, Aang," he says a little impatiently. "Who cares about Chinese people's feelings, after all? Don't you know, this whole pandemic, this kung flu, was manufactured by Chinese people eating things we shouldn't have eaten, so of course we don't deserve any respect."

He knows he's venting at the wrong person, but everything just seems to have come to a boiling point today, weeks upon months upon years, really, of racial discrimination, sometimes overt, sometimes veiled by a double-edged veneer of condescending praise.

"Today I was covering for Dr. Jameson, too; his wife just went into labor. It's late in the afternoon, and the last appointment of the day is a woman who normally sees Dr. Jameson, because he did her thyroidectomy. So after Nicholas was done seeing her and reported back to me, I went in to see her, and of course the first thing she wants to know is, where is my doctor? So I had to explain to her that I'm covering for her doctor today, which is perfectly normal for colleagues in the same subspecialty to do. But then she wants to know, aren't there any other doctors who can see me? Which is when I start to get red flags.

"It's late, I've had a long day of seeing unfamiliar patients, I'm frazzled by my residents' misinformed belief that I'm not fully confident in my sexuality just because I didn't win the… the testosterone expression genetic lottery." He shifts to a more comfortable position facing Aang, cheek pillowed on his forearm, jawline still barely prickly with stubble despite not having shaved for the past two days. "And when I'm really tired and distracted, I get a little lisp, I stumble over some words. Doesn't mean I don't speak English as well as the next American—hell, my English is better than most—but this woman takes it to mean that I came here on an H1B and can barely speak the language, much less converse intelligently about her thyroid condition.

"I did not suffer through five years of residency and two years of fellowship to be talked at like I'm a naïve pre-med student," he rages. "And yet here she is, like, "'Micrograms? No, honey, it's not micrograms—I take 200 em-cee-gee's of Synthroid every day, not that levo-whatever you just said. Do you need me to spell it for you?'" He rolls through the 'thr' of Synthroid at an exaggeratedly slow pace, imitating her mocking tone.

"Oh my god—em-cee-gee's are… mcg stands for micrograms!" Aang realizes. "Is she for real?"

"And Synthroid is levothyroxine, which she would know if she read the packaging of her pill bottle instead of disparaging me for a minor mispronunciation," Zuko says tiredly. What a punchline to the joke of a nation that throws its doors wide to welcome all immigrants, supposedly.

"I'm sorry, Zuko," Aang says helplessly. He wishes Zuko had told him about things like this before—it can't be the first time it's happened. "That's… infuriating. I can't believe people are like that, even when you're their doctor. It's…"

"Not something you probably have to deal with, given that your 'patients' are all carved up into little glass slides," Zuko says in an attempt at humor. They have to cope, one way or another.

"Or they're dead—I do cover the autopsy service every six weeks or so. But yeah, if you told that lady today that Dr. Carroll would be in to see her, I daresay she'd feel a little let down after I walked in the door."

Zuko knows that Aang was adopted from Tibet by an American couple 30 years ago. He remembers nothing of his homeland, nor the parents who surrendered him to an orphanage, and he's never tried to find their whereabouts—Mr. and Mrs. Carroll are his parents, and there aren't any better to be found in the world. Though he's got the standard "growing up Asian-American" starter pack under his belt ("your English is so good!" "where are you from? California? No, like, where are you from originally?"), it's somehow never bothered him too much.

"I'm sorry," he says again. "You don't deserve this. No one deserves this, just because some bigots think you're personally responsible for the coronavirus. It's… horrible."

In the dark, Aang has only Zuko's silence and the tenseness of his shoulders as he cradles him to his chest to gauge how he's feeling. Yeah… this isn't working. Teapot's snores whistle peacefully, breaths much less pressured than Zuko's as he struggles not to cry.

"I love you. I love you," he murmurs fiercely, but also helplessly. "I wish I knew what to say to make you feel better."

Dozens of ideas flit through his mind—would it help if you talked to a mental health professional? Or the other Asian surgeons in the department? Have you thought about reporting this?

Who would he even report the patient to? Aang despairs. It's not like we can make patients take the mandatory HR module on diversity, equity, and inclusion. There's no accountability on their end.

Talk to the surgery residency director about his residents' behavior? Dead ends, all of them. Who would listen? Who isn't already weighed down by the world's innumerable stressors and injustices? Who has time to hear out the woes of a minority group perceived to be the most unfettered and overrepresented in medicine, if anything? Who fucking cares?

"I wish I knew what to say to make you feel better."

So Aang doesn't always know, after all. But it's okay. He doesn't have to know. No one really knows, and that's the root of the problem, isn't it?

What is there to say in the wake of faceless, intangible injustices like this? Zuko wonders. Half the time, he's not sure if his experiences really constitute racism, or if he's just primed and oversensitive from months of watching the increasingly xenophobic news. Did Jason schedule Jin for more than her fair share of overnight call last year because she was the only single, childless junior resident, or because she's Chinese and he knew she wouldn't complain? Did Zuko get passed over for promotion to associate professor this year despite being objectively and subjectively more qualified than Dr. Langley because of his race?

Or am I just flinching at shadows, dodging phantoms that aren't there? If anti-Asian sentiment is a disease of this country, then it's still subclinical, and until something really bad happens, an exacerbation that throws all its symptoms into sharp relief, we're not going to get anything in the way of a diagnosis, much less treatment and prevention.

It is February 2021. Something really bad has yet to happen, but he knows it's coming. He hugs Aang more tightly, Teapot crammed between them, and hopes that even if they can't come out of this completely unscathed, they can at least weather the storm together.

A/N: Despite wanting to let my work speak for itself, I should address a few things about anti-Asian racism. Obviously, it takes many forms, not just limited to shootings and beatings and physical violence, though these certainly are the most extreme that you see reported in the media. There are relatively "benign" forms that seem almost more insidious, such as verbal othering: "Where are you from originally? Your English is so good!" and stuff that's just straight up bullshit: "Asians are super successful; I have a lot of Asian doctor friends; there's loads of Asians in engineering, Silicon Valley, Wall Street, academia…"

Like okay, we get it, you bought into the model minority myth. But what about the Asians that worked hard to earn a living at the spa and got shot last month? What about the Asians who do your dry cleaning or run the local Thai restaurant or clean the bathroom at your workplace? They're scraping by to earn a living, far from the success story that the myth touts. Are they not Asians too, or are they just subhuman? This kind of talk erases the experiences of a diverse group, assuming that they have met all their needs successfully by themselves, which is not true.

I lightly touched on the emasculation of Asian men in this piece, which goes hand-in-hand with the hypersexualization of Asian women. Man, I don't know if I even want to get into this; I don't feel like I can have a productive discussion about this in my state of mind. Suffice to say that it has its roots in Western imperialism in Asia since the… 19th century? Maybe earlier. It continues to be reinforced today by the media, thanks very much. If you think people wouldn't talk about this in such openly crass terms (even doctors!), I promise you, they do.

Overall, anti-Asian racism gets you in a real mental bind, I can tell you that. You question yourself a lot. You wonder, was that cashier less friendly to me than he was to the person in front of me because I'm Asian? You wonder, am I just making a mountain of a molehill, trying to artificially inflate the perception of Asian-American discrimination? You wonder if you're delusional, you start to convince yourself that no, Asians haven't suffered nearly as much as other minority groups and marginalized identities, we don't need anyone's help. You almost believe it's true.

And then 6 Asian women get shot for being Asian, and the world sits up and finally, finally, takes notice.

Comments are welcome, and they don't have to be great, thoughtful essays or anything. Just your regular "I liked this part for this reason!" or what have you, is fine. However, I will delete any comments that are racist or suggest that anti-Asian racism is anything less than the crisis it has become. Thanks for reading!