Modern AU, set in the same verse as Black Roses/Fracturing/Living in a Glass House.

This is quite an unpleasant fic.

Warnings: incest, rape, underage, self-harm, disordered eating

a variable ratio is the most effective reinforcement schedule

When she was eleven, while Zuko was still at home, she fancied she was growing up. She looked in the mirror and thought there was a bit more to her bony frame than there had been a year ago. She traced her fingers along her hipbones and thought they were wider, imagined her bust was swelling. The thought made her heart beat faster with excitement. Childhood was a good thing to leave in the dirt. Age meant power. Age meant freedom.

It wasn't only her reflection in the mirror, and that distorted her view.

"You're lovely."

His touch was always gentle. It was now. His hands were large enough that he could put them fully around her waist, large enough that they covered all her skin when his fingers traveled across the landscape of her torso.

"You're growing into a beautiful woman."

This was happiness. His compliments were ambrosia. She smiled in the mirror, her heart fluttering, and she wished Ursa could see her now. All the insistence that she was too aggressive for a lady, that her hair needed to be let down, meant nothing. He thought she was beautiful.

His hands slipped under elastic and white cloth. Her breath caught in her throat.

"I think you've outgrown training bras, don't you?"

She waited a week, and then two, and the opportunity never presented itself, so she ended up skipping school. It didn't matter, not when she could skip for weeks and still do better than her peers, and besides there was always Ty Lee to fill her in if she missed anything important.

The women wandering the selection of lingerie gave her odd looks, but she ignored them. The girls' section contained only bright colors and cartoon prints, stripes in every color of the rainbow, garish and ugly and hopelessly juvenile. They were still all only for children.

It was hard to find anything small enough, and her pickings still hung a little loose, but that didn't matter. She paid with her allowance, money generously set aside from her father's endless pockets, and went home with excitement in her every step.

She was nervous. She dressed herself up and waited for him. She needn't have worried. He came home from work later than usual, his brow furrowed with some stress, some underling's incompetence, but when he saw her he smiled.

"I knew it," he said, and kissed her, and a million disapproving glances of other women in the store didn't mean anything anymore, because Zuko was a disaster waiting to happen and she could do no wrong, and as long as her father loved her she stood on top of the world. "You're irresistible."

When he was finished, when he'd admired her and ravished her and split her gently open, his tone changed.

"Skipping school?"

The nerves returned.

It was for you, I did it for you, I just wanted—

Somehow it seemed he was never quite as careful after that.

She's taken eighty chews and whatever it was before, now it's flavorless, disgusting mush between her teeth and on her tongue. She has to swallow sooner or later, but it seems like it's always later and hunger is so much better than whatever the hell this is. She takes a drink of water and manages to gulp it down. The relief lasts only until she looks down at the box on her lap and sees it's full. The idea of another bite makes her feel physically ill, so she sets it aside and crosses her legs. How many did she last today? Five? Seven?

I never knew young ladies eat so much.

"Not hungry?" Mai's face is as mild as it ever is, but her eyes are piercing. Azula wants to slap her gaze away, give her a black eye to match her black hair, make her suffer for even daring to comment on it.

"This is disgusting. It's overcooked." Why did she say that? She doesn't need to defend herself to them. She doesn't need to make excuses. If she says she doesn't want to eat, there's nothing they can do about it

And here I thought you were too confident to worry about something as trivial as your weight.

-except ask more prying questions.

"Here, switch!" Ty Lee's lunch is half-gone, but she places it on Azula's lap and takes the abandoned bento for herself.

The best way to rebellion would be to devour it all and smile and pretend that every comment and glance hasn't been rooted too deeply in her psyche to extract except through force. But she can't. She's too far gone. She tried before and it ended bent double in the nurse's office.

You smell disgusting. Go wash yourself off.

Bile rises in her throat, maybe because she ate too much and maybe because now she wants to slap Ty too. She doesn't. She stands, taking Ty Lee's offering with her, and throws it in the nearest trash can. Ty Lee looks taken aback, her wide eyes even wider, her pink lips open a little. Mai's giving Azula a reproachful look, but she couldn't care less.

"Thank you," she says, and sits between them again. There are no more questions.

When she was twelve, Zuko was gone, and her father no longer complimented her for wearing lace. Somehow, without her paying attention when she should have been paying attention, it had become mandatory.

His temper had been more vicious lately. She couldn't remember the last time his smiles weren't edged with something steely. She couldn't remember the last time he told her she was beautiful, she was a thousand times better than Zuko and all the other girls of her class. It felt like a personal failing. She felt as if she was fading away, as if he no longer looked at her and liked what he saw.

He was no longer gentle, and he wasn't gentle that night (not even though she'd worn his favorite and put on mascara and made herself everything she could imagine he wanted). Somewhere in between him biting down her neck and fitting his whole hand inside her, his thumb stroked her earlobe.

"No earrings?"

Her ears had never been pierced.

She was afraid, so afraid she was shaking, but her desire for anything at all resembling love was a thousand times more powerful. It was past midnight, and tomorrow was Sunday, and her only option was to stand in front of the mirror while her hands shook. She'd managed to find a needle, sterilized it with flame, ice her only painkiller.

She held a bar of soap behind her earlobe and forced herself to take deep breaths, forced her damn hands to stop shaking, imagined what he would say, how he would smile, how it would be all right.

She cried out. Just a pinch. Just a little pinch, and then she tore the needle out again.

She shook again at the thought of doing it twice.

She went fishing in her mother's old jewelry box and found a pair of dangly golden things. They tugged at her lobes, hurt, but that didn't matter.

She wore them for him, dressed up as she'd become accustomed to doing, and felt far, far more nervous than she had before driving the needle in.

He pulled on them roughly and then laughed.

"You look like a prostitute."

Her breath stopped.

He doesn't like her spending time with them. She knows that. He likes to keep her at home all the time she's not at school, would much rather pay for a tutor than send her off to cram school. She supposes she should be grateful that he lets her go to school at all.

She lights up. She was thirteen when she started. She loves it and she hates it, loves that he never told her she could do it, would be infuriated if he found out, hates that this silent destruction is the only rebellion she will allow herself.

Foolish weak little girl. If life's too hard, why don't you run away? Why don't you just die?

Mai and Ty Lee have stopped commenting on her chain smoking. Maybe sooner or later they'll stop commenting on her goddamn appetite too. She wonders what the point of keeping them around is. They're just window dressing, just there in the same way that the furniture of her room is. Maybe she only spends time with them because she knows he hates it.

She wakes up in the night and craves it so badly it hurts, but his arms are around her and she can't smoke at home. This is her rebellion: pain and more pain, idiocy piled upon idiocy, the destruction of something that was never beautiful to begin with.

"My birthday's coming up," Ty Lee says. Azula breathes in and out, smells and tastes smoke, and closes her eyes. She wonders when she'll get cancer. She wonders whether he'd forbid her chemotherapy, rather watch her die than have his doll shrivel and waste away and have all her hair fall out.

"Yeah?" Mai says, only the faintest hint of interest in her voice. They are both just background noise. Her thoughts are much louder than they'll ever be. "Doing anything fun?"

"I want to have you both over," Ty Lee says. "Like for a slumber party!"

Azula laughs. They both look at her. She doesn't really know why she laughed. She wonders what she would have to do for her father to let her spend the night at Ty's. She used to believe that growing up was freedom. What an elaborate joke her life has turned out to be.

"I can't have you getting spoiled, now, can I," says the man who inherited his fortune and company from his father.

To her surprise, her phone buzzes. Her heart begins pounding, and she wishes fervently that it's Zuko, a wish that would never ordinarily cross her mind.

It's not. Of course not. Luck is not something she possesses in abundance.

Why aren't you at home?

She stands, explaining nothing to the girls on either side of her, and stamps out her cigarette with her foot. There is no time to wash, to change clothes, to hide what she has been doing. She wonders what sort of marks she'll need to conceal tomorrow.

She looks at their confused faces.

Smoking is rebellion. Seeing them is rebellion. Now she's running home. The cigarette smoldering on the ground is him. They are him. What she is wearing, the holes in her ears, the lipstick she applies like a shield, all of it is him. She is absolutely empty. He dominates every second, every thought, every emotion.

There is nothing to "Azula" but the man who made her.

When she was fifteen, she was old enough that the pretention of gentleness could vanish altogether. Fifteen, after all, was practically an adult, when at eleven she'd already been becoming a beautiful woman, when at twelve she looked like a prostitute.

She could not recall ever saying no to her father. Even then, when it hurt more than anything should hurt, when he wasn't interested in using enough lubricant or trying not to rip her insides apart, she didn't say it. She thought of Zuko, fallen from grace and living in shame.

It wasn't really that big a sacrifice, not when she's been his personal little whore for years now, not when she's done everything he asked and everything he implied she wanted. She knew her father's taste. She knew every inch of him. And now, as blood trickled slowly down her thighs from her anus, he knew every damned inch of her too.

There were salty tracks from her eyes. She couldn't stop all her little noises. Then his fingers reached around and gently stroked her cheeks clean.

"Does this hurt? I thought you were stronger than that."

The wine glasses were a wedding present. Azula doesn't know if Ozai and Ursa ever used them. They've sat in the top shelf of the cupboard for as long as she can remember. She has no idea how expensive they were, but she's confident the cost had four digits. They're exquisitely beautiful.

She pulls them down one by one and throws them as hard as she possibly can at the kitchen's tile floor. Yes, she calls this rebellion, though they mean nothing to him and would be easily replaced. She's too afraid, too weak, to go after anything he cares about.

They tinkle and shatter into millions of crystalline pieces. The sound is music to her ears. Shards fly everywhere. One. Two. Three. Four. Five. Six. Seven. Eight. All of them go. All of them break. And then, possessed by nothing but her own irrational mind, she shatters too.

She doesn't press her hands softly into the pile. She shoves. She hits and punches them over and over again. She is screaming, not because of the pain, but because there is so, so much to scream about. It hurts. It feels so incredibly lovely. There is red running down her arms. She has slit skin and veins and who knows what else. There is nothing but red. She has lacerated herself. This is her, blood and shattering, a scream while nobody else is home.

The twelve-year-old flinched to stab a needle through her earlobe. The seventeen-year-old delights in this destruction. The mess of shattered crystal is streaked with red, and clear flowers have embedded themselves in her arms. Euphoria takes her, a feeling she has rarely known before, as she holds her useless, bleeding hands up to inspect them, as trickles run down her arms and down her body, stain her clothes beyond repair. She could lay down on it, pierce herself thoroughly, crucify herself on this pointless, useless act of insolence.

The driver enters the house before her father to find Azula slumped against the sink, dreamily eyeing the mess she's made. He goes white and curses, tries to haul her upright, asks her what's wrong. She just laughs. Then she sees her father's silhouette in the doorway. He doesn't seem to be perturbed by the sight of his daughter dripping blood and glass. His frown is the same he'd wear when addressing an inconvenience on the job.

"Take her to a hospital," he snaps, waving a hand dismissively. The driver nods and tries to escort Azula, still smiling, around her disaster. Her head is spinning. She wonders if she'll pass out; it feels more like she's about to throw up.

Her father stops her in the doorway and looks her up and down. Then he smiles, the smirk she inherited from him.

"Red suits you."

Euphoria is gone. Happiness is gone. She stares up at him. This, as all else, was him. There is no use in anything at all.

Now she really wants to scream, wants to return to her mess and stab her jugular next time.

She doesn't.

She lets the driver escort her out to the car, dripping all the way.

She lives.