Note: Written for the Autumn Tyzula Week in the Tyzula Renaissance Forum organized by electric gurll. As well as taking the Yakuza AU from the Prompt Thread. We don't have autumn here where I live but we have typhoons and I guess the endless rain makes me compulsive enough to continue ficcing. I have a very strange writing style (blame my lack of proper schooling) but it seems to be particularly apparent in this.

Anyway, enjoy your week ahead. Meanwhile, university starts for me.

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001 Luck

Ty Lee's first love is like luck, waning and unpredictable. It is meant to be, wonderful in its briefness. And it eventually ran out. Azula dropped out of middle school very soon before Ty Lee lost the will to continue her own education and took the same path. Ever since then, their encounters were prompted only by mere chances, by Lady Luck smiling at her for a second before taking it all away again.

"Aren't I the lucky one today?" She hears the saccharine charm of a purr two years later, in a casino that paid her rent and fed her at least once a day. The ramen stand takes care of the rest of the expenses and whatever guilty pleasures she might have would sometimes be quenched by a hefty tip in a lucky night. Sixteen-year old Azula is winning and the die is hers to cast once more. "Running away suits you Ty Lee." She feels more self conscious in her waitress garb even if the underhanded compliment is not something she heard the first time. Azula wins a million for the night. Ty Lee is left with a grand after the sex.

Three more years pass and Ty Lee still thinks that the kisses, the touch, the fire that burns and the ashes left once she wakes up with Azula gone is just luck even if it happens every month, in every new job she takes. "This is my calling." She tells her when Azula suddenly appears in her dressing room after her ballet recital. She does not know how she got in but being the daughter and heir apparent of the city's crime lord must have its perks.

Azula rolls her eyes, scoffs at the answer that she hears everytime. She does not ask anymore but Ty Lee tells her anyway. This time though, instead of fucking straight against the wall, Azula replies back. "I am your calling."

And perhaps she is. Perhaps, Ty Lee has many a time wished that their illicit meetings, their forbidden romance, the one night stands she likes to think more of, would eventually produce a golden-eyed child with wavy brown locks. But they have no such luck. Because luck has nothing to do with it. She thinks past the impossibility of such reproduction, the doomed nature of their unnatural union for those are immaterial in face of what really is the matter. Because even if one of them had been born a male, Azula would still be gone the next morning. "What am I to you?"

She puts a finger between their lips. Azula's eyes widen. "What kind of question is that?" is all she blurts out and Ty Lee knows then, without pursuing the subject that she does not have that kind of luck to fall and stay in love.

Two years came by and went. A nameless man leaves his seed in Ty Lee's and she does not mind. Azula has departed to make a name for herself in the underworld. She becomes the city's famous secret, the oxymoron fitting her baffling existence. The bond that bound Ty Lee to her that does not make any sense becomes strong in every news item that she is not mentioned and yet her presence lingered like the ash of her cigarette. A suspicious suicide by a self-righteous politician is Azula's murder to Ty Lee. She whispered sin in her ears when they were together but like every life that she takes without mercy, this does not matter to Azula.

Azula appears on TV, impeccable and as a CEO's promising daughter. "The most influential young woman in the country." They all say but the darkness in her eyes is the only thing that Ty Lee sees. She touches her protruding stomach when she feels the telltale ache in her chest.

"You were knocked up." Is her first remark to her in two long years. She does not sound jealous, offended, miffed. Just curious. Ty Lee heaves panicked breaths in the backseat, curls her fists as the pain methodically tears her insides apart. She mutters a soundless scream. Inside, her mind finally processes the luck of meeting someone who is willing to take a pregnant woman to the hospital in the cutthroat city of busy men in suits who all have a meeting in under ten minutes. The sensation of falling back to familiar eyes. The beautiful sight of golden orbs.

"I am her..." Azula speaks to the doctor with the ease of a diplomat. And it surprises her how the girl she thought to not care about her knows about her birthday, her address, everything that even her parents did not bother to remember. "I am a good friend."

It was luck when they saw each other again in that restaurant, when of all people, of all times, Ty Lee was given a chance not to go through the ordeal of giving birth alone. She does not expect what happens next. But for the first time in their unacknowledged relationship, in her once unrequited love, Azula has stayed with her until the next morning.

"Who is the father?"

"It does not matter." Because this is her child. It does not have to be someone else's too for them to see their worth.

"What are you going to name her?" Azula sounds interested, eager. She touches the baby girl's cheek. Hesitantly at first. And when the girl cooes softly and does not flinch, she gains courage. For a moment, Ty Lee can imagine that the three of them are a family and Azula is not a Yakuza Princess who breaks attachments as easily as she makes them and that she gave birth to a child with golden eyes.

"She is born lucky." Ty Lee mutters. She places a kiss on the baby's forehead. "Yoshino."

"Child of good luck." She thinks that this is the first time she saw Azula smile. "Fitting."

When Azula comes back the next day and stays, Ty Lee starts to think that this may be fate and not luck after all.

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