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After two weeks at sea, Zuko locked himself in his room. His uncle noticed after only a few minutes of his absence but when Zuko didn't respond to his knocking, he left well enough alone. The boy had been through plenty.
Zuko was starting to find the colour red extremely distasteful. He took down the tapestries on the wall, lay them on the steely floor and lit them, held the fire back as he watched, letting it consume the fabric slowly, lick the skin of his arms and hands. He was more than capable of keeping himself from being burnt but if he slipped up and allowed his flesh to smoulder more than a few times he could pass it off as an accident.
A week in, most of the flammable things in the room had been exhausted. Not that there was any shortage of fire. Zuko watched it spark around his fingers, let it dance across the floor. He was really starting to hate red.
When he managed to sleep, it was unpleasant. Take your pick of traumatizing memories to relive over and over again every time you shut your eyes. Would it be his father trying to kill him or his mother leaving him cold tonight? How about his father casting him aside and cracking his head on the stone floor when he said he didn't want to go to the Royal Fire Academy for Girls? That was a good one, blood pooling in his hands as he tried to get up with slick fingers, falling down over and over again. There was always more blood than there really was in his dreams, always more fire. It always looked like his father was about to consume the whole room in fire before he struck Zuko down. It was getting hard to remember what reality looked like.
He always awoke to someone having left him food and water. He could sit and listen for his uncle's footsteps outside the door, see how many times a day he checked in on him, but he didn't care. Honestly.
Two weeks. A month at sea. Zuko didn't sleep anymore, not after he saw his uncle grab him by the neck, tell him he would never be a man, and throw him in the ocean.
A few more days. He tried to stand up and fell immediately, his head cloudy. Maybe it was the lack of sleep, maybe it was the forgetting to eat, maybe it was the burns running up every limb. Now they were being interspersed with red lines and his swords were smeared in dried blood.
Zuko fucking hated the colour red. He burnt the rest of the bed. What sleep did come to him had been on the floor anyway.
For three weeks, he hadn't shed any tears and then suddenly it was all he could do, screaming in frustration and anger and loss and grief. The footsteps outside the door were loud and he yelled and cried as loud as he could to keep his solitude. The door didn't open. Zuko ran out of tears eventually. His throat burned and so did the rest of him.
He took to undressing, wrapping bandages around his chest tighter than before, then dressing again, staring down at himself, catching reflections in his swords. Every time he was dissatisfied. His ribs ached and he could barely breathe but maybe he was getting closer to something.
Fire didn’t come to him anymore so much as he came to fire. He would be sitting, watching his hands move and flex, tendons and veins pushing against his pale skin and then suddenly he would see it in his grasp.
He listened for his uncle. He came every hour.
His mind was a pendulum between doubting he ever really was a prince and hating those who would call him otherwise. Between wanting to abandon the man who nearly killed him and trying to please his father. Between prolonging his punishment or ending it now.
Four weeks and Zuko wondered what everyone thought, what leads there were on the Avatar, what his family was doing, what they said about him. Six weeks at sea and four alone and Zuko started to realize that maybe he was losing his mind.
Fire didn't come to him anymore.
His uncle came less frequently.
He pulled off his robe, let it hang around his waist, unwrapped his chest from bandages. His fingers found bruises along his ribs where the pressure had been too much. His entire torso was covered in the red lines of compressed flesh. He raised his hands, grasped at his chest, dug his fingernails in. Blood wouldn't come, even to his best scratching and tearing. Only white lines, quickly fading. He hated red. He hated white more. Reaching for his swords, he held them at arms length in front of him and took in his own reflection as best he could in the trembling, dirty blades. Crown Prince Zuko stared back at him. He angled the swords lower and there was only a pale, emaciated body below the shoulders. Ugly and useless.
He gripped the swords tight and pulled them suddenly to his chest, unfamiliar determination coursing through him. It was refreshing. He felt alive. The blade bore down on his own chest, drawing blood that ran down his breasts and dripped onto the robe around his legs. He pushed and pushed and he cut deep, yes, but not nearly deep enough. He closed his eyes and tried again, pushing down, and opened them to find his chest still mostly intact. There was a lot of blood. It soaked through the robe and started to drip to the floor. Zuko took his sword, placed it under his breast, pushed it down and pulled his sword up.
If he could just step out of his body and face it like the opponent it was, this would be easy. But his body remained intact and nothing was cut off and there was just a lot of blood. It was running everywhere. Was he dreaming? His swords clattered to the floor and it was a really good idea to lay down on the floor. The metal was bitter cold against his cheek and he watched red rivers run tiny courses along the floor and saw them go under and out the door. His eyes shut and for the first time he felt like sleeping as he heard the door open suddenly and felt the first brush of his uncle's hands around his shoulders.