This is a story for the Tyzula RomCom Challenge. It's for the prompt about Azula and Ty Lee mothering twins together. It starts in the first year of their life and will go on until they're eighteen, or maybe later, I'm loving this story idea so I'm not sure exactly how long I'll go on. It's going to update every weekend.
Ships: Tyzula, Maizai, Zutara, Sukka, Taang.
Warnings: Adult humor, some language and some slightly sexual content in the future.
TYRANNY AND BLISS
BOOK ONE: YEAR ONE
Chapter One
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Azula fiercely smashes her fist through the glass of a hospital vending machine. Against her will, Zuko grabs her by the waist and pulls her away from it, but not before she lands another satisfying kick.
She stands in a room that smells of antiseptic littered with dated Sports Illustrated magazines, ugly salmon pink themed paintings and endless plastic chairs. Now, Azula stands stuck in Zuko's strong arms as she grinds her teeth and worries endlessly about her two daughters.
Mai slowly lowers her magazine and dryly says, "Do you now see why Ty Lee didn't want you in the delivery room?"
Azula snarls at her, "I'm concerned about my babies! This is perfectly normal!"
"This is honestly not normal," Katara says, glancing up from her phone and cocking an eyebrow, "I've seen fathers freak out, but I can't say I've ever seen someone smash a chair and a vending machine. And I work here."
"Why is she here? Who gave her the right to be here?" Azula shrieks, trying to escape Zuko's grasp again. "I did not give her the right to be here!"
Katara rolls her eyes. "Zuko made me trade shifts with my friend to come."
Azula glances around at the waiting room. In attendance: her best friend who happens to be her stepmother due to an unplanned teen pregnancy and the five-year-old child beside her, her brother and his horrible wife who married him at a courthouse without inviting her, her beloved father, Ty Lee's terrible best friend Suki, Suki's awful husband slash my co-sibling-in-law Sokka sleeping beneath a blanket, a goody-two-shoes boy with tattoos that could never make him look tough with his nose in a book along with his blind girlfriend whose sharp tongue tonight is silenced by spiked coffee. It is a delightful crowd here for the birth of Azula's children.
"What are you naming them?" Suki asks with a yawn.
"Do I have to answer her?" Azula asks, sneering at Ty Lee's best friend and attempting to wriggle out of Zuko's arms. Suki smiles and waves back at the woman who tortured her in middle and high school.
"Tyranny and Bliss," Zuko replies in lieu of his sister, a smile creeping onto his face. "They each got to name one. Azula chose Tyranny and Ty Lee chose Bliss."
Toph asks through her cup, "Do you want your kids to hate you? I mean, Tyranny, she's gonna be a career criminal which is kinda cool but not what most people aim for with their kids, and Bliss will be a failed beauty queen who becomes either a stripper or barista. I don't know which of those two jobs is more embarrassing."
"Those are really bad names," Suki superfluously adds.
Azula snarls, "No one asked you, and no one asked you to be here either."
Suki retorts, "Ty Lee asked me to be here."
Ozai stands up, pushing his youngest daughter Alice onto his much-younger wife's lap, and everyone falls silent with wide eyes like little kids caught fighting by their big bad dad.
"I see I have to intervene. Princess, we should take a walk," he says, and then mutters under his breath, "Since I am the only father here somehow. My family disappoints me."
He beckons, Zuko releases his sister and Azula follows him down the hideous hospital hallway. She wants her inheritance, after all, and so she will do whatever he says.
"I want those babies to come out," Azula says as she walks. Ozai seems prepared to take her down if she breaks anything else. "I have never been helpless before. Never. And I am."
Ozai never has been good at emotional conversations. Neither has Azula.
And, so, he says, "Princess, how would you like to be my company president?"
It is mostly all of what Azula always wanted. Once he dies, she expects to be a CEO, which is better, but she will take second best for the next forty years or so. Then again, Azula despises pity.
"I don't want you to give me this job just because I decided to have kids," she says strongly, touching her knuckle to her rosy lips.
"Fine. We will have an interview if you care so much," he says, crossing his arms and leaning against the wall. "Why do you think you are right for this position?"
Azula graciously replies, "Because I am a people person and look great in a blazer."
"The job is yours," says Ozai in a voice that Azula would never question. "Enjoy. I was going to give it to you anyway. It isn't as if I have better options."
"I do love unofficial monarchies in business."
"Yes. And then Tyranny can have it after you."
"Are you already picking favorite grandchildren?"
"Of course I am." Ozai smirks.
"What if you like Bliss better?"
"Tyranny is yours and Bliss is Ty Lee's. I thought you two already worked that out. I mean, Zuko was supposed to be mine but he was disappointing so your mother and I had you. You just have the privilege of getting your children simultaneously."
Azula decides not to argue. Being a company president is completely worth traumatizing her children and angering her beloved wife. God willing, she shall take after her father and her family will be too afraid to protest her crooked ways.
"Of course, Tyranny will never disappoint you," says Azula, feeling somewhat like a woman pledging a witch her firstborn child in exchange for a glamorous dream career.
Mai interrupts Azula and Ozai by sighing and dryly announcing, "Your babies are born or something. If you care."
Azula dashes past her without so much as a thank you and joins her wife and her wife's sister and mother as quickly as she can. She walks in, slams the door behind her, and sees the two most beautiful babies who were ever born. Ever.
"I need to hold them. One at a time, I guess." Azula orders. Ty Lee's sister complies, since no one else does a thing, and hands the first one to Azula.
When she looks at those wide golden eyes, she knows what love feels like for the first time. Or so she tells people when she recounts the story; it has a poetic ring to it, true or not.
Azula declares, "This one is Tyranny," and as she gestures at the one in Ty Lee's arms, "and that one is Bliss."
Ty Lee smiles. She had it the other way around, but her daughters were identical and no one would know the difference.
"We're a perfect family," Ty Lee gushes, holding Bliss tighter to her chest.
.
In the lovely hospital room far nicer than anywhere else in the ugly medical building, Azula lies on the bed beside a sleeping Ty Lee, while the family crowds everyone to an uncomfortable level. Tyranny rests with Azula, who thinks she might never set down her daughter. Alice—Azula's little sister—holds Bliss in her arms. Ty Lee permitted the five-year-old to hold one baby, but Azula will never put Tyranny in harm's way.
"Mai is really holding her," says Ty Lee. "Mai won't drop her first grandchildren."
"Jesus, I'm twenty-five. I can't have grandchildren," says Mai, feeling faint but hiding it well.
Toph says with a wide, mocking smile, "Didn't you ever hear the famous saying that gold diggers have grandbabies young?"
Mai does not care enough to argue. She just adjusts Alice's arms to make sure she does not drop Bliss and kill the mildly happy mood this family is in for once. Somehow, this is the least violent gathering they ever have had.
Katara walks in and sets a stuffed penguin beside the sink. "So, you're a family now," she says. "A little family with two cute kids and a stay-at-home mom and a cute house in a bourgeois neighborhood with a literal white picket fence and a business executive for a breadwinner. Do you need me to buy you a golden retriever?"
Azula says coolly, "I hate dogs. No dogs."
"Your kid will ask for one," says Sokka, completely uninvited to speak to Azula. "They'll ask for one and ask for one and ask for one until you finally give up. Me and Katara did that. Our gran-gran hated dogs but we ended up with four."
Ty Lee chirps with her eyes still closed, "Like when the cat yowls until we cave in and turn the sink on for her."
"Kids yowl way worse than cats," remarks Mai. "It's torture, and you think it'll end, and the doctors say it'll end, and the books say it'll end, but it never ends. Never."
Azula shows fear for the first time in her life.