Blow Away The Ash- Part One
Pairings: Sokka/Zuko, Azula/Zuko
Rating: NC-17
Warnings: self hatred, self harm, incest, sexual abuse, rape, victim arousal, eating disorders.
Summary: Every night, Zuko cries in his sleep. Sokka, who shares his tent, attempts to ignore it, but eventually he cannot, so he wakes Zuko to comfort him. Zuko tells Sokka all about what happened to him when he was young, and Sokka yearns to help him to heal.
Notes: There isn’t any Zuko/Sokka in the prologue and the first part. There will be more in later parts. Please do heed the warnings: this is probably the darkest fic I’ve ever written in terms of its content, and is more explicit than what I would usually write.
Blow Away The Ash
Part One
It first happens when Zuko is nine, and Azula is eight.
He is under the overs in his four-poster, sleeping lightly, having just drifted away into sleep. He doesn’t hear the creak of the door, or the gentle pad of small feet on stone as Azula enters his room and crosses the floor to his bed. He wakes with a start as he feels someone slide in next to him, disrupting his quiet and warmth. He flips over to face the intruder, and sees his little sister’s mischievous smile in the dark.
“Azula!” he hisses, rubbing his eyes, “What do you want? What are you doing in my bed?”
“I wanna show you what I learned today,” she tells him in a low voice, her grin not failing.
“No,” Zuko frowns, “I don’t wanna know. We can’t fire bend in here anyway, it’s forbidden and you know it.”
“It’s not fire bending,” she says. Zuko is puzzled.
“Then what-” he begins, but is interrupted by Azula pressing a hard kiss full on his mouth. His eyes widen in shock and he pushes her away at once.
“Azula!” he chokes, having to stop himself from yelling and waking someone, “What do you think you’re doing?”
“I like it,” she tells him plainly, something of a threat in her voice. Zuko’s heart starts to drum in fear.
“Go away. Leave me alone. I want to sleep.” He tries to roll over again, but Azula takes a hold of his shoulders and pins him still. He wriggles, growing more and more panicked, but she holds him tight. He takes a breath to scream for his mother, but Azula camps her little hand over his mouth.
“I wanna be like the grown ups,” Azula tells him quietly, still smiling that awful smile, “Don’t fight me.”
Keeping one hand over Zuko’s mouth, she reaches into his pyjama trousers with the other. He doesn’t move, paralysed with terror and confusion. She wraps her hand around his penis, and begins to move her grip up and down along its length. Zuko bites the palm of the hand over his mouth, trying to make her stop; sinks his teeth right into her skin, drawing blood, and yet she doesn’t react to the pain, if indeed she feels any at all. She’s still smirking. She fastens her pace, her brother hardening in her hand. Zuko starts to cry, struggling to breathe and horrified at his body’s reaction to what’s happening. Azula doesn’t relent. She stimulates him until he orgasms, feeling like an explosion of utter pleasure within him, in conflict with the agony in his mind. He cries out against her hand before she finally lets him go, and he scrambles away, gasping for air and sobbing. He falls back into the pillows, weeping desperately, not knowing what else to do and praying to the spirits that this is all a horrible nightmare. She lies on top of him and kisses him again, and this time he doesn’t even fight back.
After seems like an eternity in this Hell, Azula rolls off him and sits up on the edge of the bed, reaching up to adjust her hair. She turns around to lookout him with her massive doe-eyes, and Zuko feels like he’s going to be sick, because he’s looking at his sister, his little sister, and she looks like a baby.
“Don’t tell anyone,” she warns, “Well, like they’d believe you anyway. They’d think you were having unclean fantasies and they’d lock you up in the temple to repent for your sins.”
She leaves, and Zuko draws his knees to his chest and cries himself to sleep.
*
Zuko is eleven, and his cousin Lu Ten is dead, bringing his Uncle Iroh home, grief-stricken; and Azula is visiting his bed every night. Sometimes she commands him to come to her room, or even into the palace grounds, because she loves how terrified he is at the risk, and he daren’t disobey her and stay in his bedroom, or else she will come and find him, and will punish him with making it all one thousand times worse.
She will always manually stimulate him, with her hands or with her mouth, and if he’s lucky, that will be all. But it often isn’t. Many times she sits astride him and forces him to penetrate her. Sometimes she penetrates him with her fingers, and once even with the hilt of the dagger that his Uncle sent him. He doesn’t touch it after that, so Azula gladly claims ownership. After two years, he’s learnt to stop crying, because it only makes her touch him for longer. He hits puberty, and she laughs the first time he comes in her hand. The morning after his mother disappears he finds his sister playing with the knife, twirling it in her hand, tossing it into the air and catching it again. Zuko runs out of the room and is violently sick in the corridor.
After that, there is nothing in life that soothes him. He loves his Uncle, but Iroh is distant, slightly empty, mourning his lost son. Zuko’s beloved mother is gone, and his father doesn’t care. He can’t even talk to Azula’s friends: she forbids it, instructs him to behave as though he is simply shy and distant, though he longs to talk to anyone who is not his sister. His fire bending, already not as good as Azula’s, suffers further from his unhappiness. There is nothing to console him. And so he turns to food.
After all, he is the crown prince: if he asks for something, it is given to him. He knows that there are children in the other nations, in war-torn towns, with nothing to eat: but that thought is not enough to stop him. All he knows is that if he only keeps eating, he can forget for a while about the feel of Azula’s fingers walking down his spine, her mouth wrapped around him like a snake devouring its prey, the smell of sweat and cum. Every bite is a distraction, a comfort, even if just for a short while.
He gains weight. Not a massive amount, but enough that it’s noticeable. His face rounds out childishly, his previously skinny body softens. His father’s lip curls whenever they dine as a family, and although he doesn’t say anything outright, his glare is enough to sting. Iroh rubs one of Zuko’s shoulders comfortingly, but daren’t speak out against his brother, the Fire Lord. Yet there is something rewarding about the distaste in Azula’s face when she presses her fingers against the gentle squish of Zuko’s stomach. She taunts and mocks him, and it doesn’t stop her visits: but they become less frequent, and Zuko feels safer.
This is all before the duel, before the burn. After that, everything changes again.
*