"Gran-Gran?" Katara once asked when she was five, her cheeks aglow with a shy blush. "Did the Avatar... have a girlfriend?"
Kana perked an eyebrow in amusement, glancing at the girl's mother. Kaya was sitting close by in the family's hut, mending a pair of Hakoda's pants and trying not to laugh. "Now why would you want to know something like that?" the elder woman asked.
Katara shrugged and tried to look uninterested. But she couldn't help it. A few giggles burst from her and she blushed even harder.
"I don't believe so." The old woman had never actually heard any romantic tales of the Avatar, so she smiled and got creative. "But I do recall hearing a legend that he was destined to fall in love… With a beautiful waterbending princess."
"A waterbender!" Kaya tried to sound surprised. "She must be a very lucky girl." she added with a knowing look at her daughter, who's talents had only been recently revealed.
Katara's face lit up into the most radiant smile either of them had ever seen. The little girl got up and spun in a circle, hugging herself and squealing with laughter and delight. The two women forgave the girl's lack of manners as she raced out of the hut in excitement, choosing instead to have a good laugh themselves.
"That's it. Your stories have completely ruined her for any other guy." Kaya informed her mother.
"Doesn't hurt a girl to have standards."
Katara ran and threw herself onto her back to snuggle into the embrace of a snowbank. She had a permanent smile as she gazed up at the wispy clouds swirling in the wind and tried to imagine, as she had many times before, what the great hero of her grandmother's tales would have looked like. Entertaining her own little fantasy that she would one day admit to only one other person ten years later, of what it might be like to be the Avatar's love.