What It Means To Care
Note: I understand that this is a surprisingly over-done thing, but I liked the idea and decided to use it to work on sentence development and imagery. This is taken from the 1sentence community on livejournal, and though I am not an official "claimed" member, I will be using all five sets (alpha through epsilon), so expect four more additions of 50 sentences to this story.
Alpha
1: Comfort
When he lived among the air monks, he found solace by praying in the arms of their goddess of mercy; when he lived among the water tribe, he found solace when he prayed in the arms of a different kind of goddess of mercy.
2: Kiss
Kissing Aang was like taking a deep look into his soul, and it made her feel small and insignificant for the split instant it took for him to kiss her back.
3: Soft
Nothing Aang had ever encountered was as soft as Katara's hair, until one cold night when they ended up huddled under a shared blanket and he discovered that her skin was infinitely softer.
4: Pain
When he was young, pain was the tattooing he endured upon becoming a master air bender; when he was older, pain was the thought of her and what he had lost when she had gone.
5: Potatoes
Katara had never heard of a potato in all her life, but Aang's vegetarianism meant learning about things she had never encountered before and adapting them for their mutual lives of compromise.
6: Rain
When it rained, she felt alive, and he felt soggy at best, but Aang would put aside his dampened senses and try to focus on whatever it was in the rain that made her smile.
7: Chocolate
Neither Katara nor Aang had ever encountered chocolate, and at first they were wary of Toph's gift, but when they found out it tasted good and melted at the mere touch of a warm finger, any hint of caution was long gone as they savored the smooth velvet off of one another's heated skin.
8: Happiness
Katara wasn't sure when she had ever felt happiness in her life, but she was willing to wait for it, certain it would come to her one day; she was right, and when it came, his name was Aang.
9: Telephone
Aang was two different people sometimes, the responsible incarnation of the Earth spirit with a thousand past lives and experiences, and the exuberant man who acted like he was discovering the world for the first time, and Katara had a hard time figuring out whom she would encounter from day to day or which tactic she ought to use when talking to him.
10: Ears
Though Aang's ears stuck out from the side of his head, and occasionally Sokka (in his more cruel moments) likened them to Momo's, Katara found them endearing, and, later, one of his more sensitive spots.
11: Name
Ever so often, Aang contemplated his names, those of the Earth, the spirit that he embodied, those of his lives (Kiyoshi, Roku, Aang), and shared his scattered identity with Katara, almost envying her singular, uncomplicated name.
12: Sensual
Even in the heat of their passions, neither Katara nor Aang forgot how to bend, and the crashing of waves and howling of winds oftentimes accompanied those moments, sprays of water and caresses of breezes offering a different sensory experience than fingers, lips, or eyes.
13: Death
Katara tried not to think about would happen when she died, because she knew Aang would simply be reincarnated again into the next Avatar, and she would never know whether this lifetime was all they would ever have.
14: Sex
Aang didn't like feeling powerless, except when it was in those vulnerable moments when he and Katara were utterly surrendered to one another.
15: Touch
She was hesitant of his touch at first, because she expected his hands to be rough and calloused from the day's work, but was pleasantly surprised to find that no matter whether he spent the day battling the forces of evil or the forces of their field, his touch was always as gentle as ever.
16: Weakness
Infallible though he may have seemed, everyone always seemed to know that Katara was his surest weakness, though if they dared threaten her, they learned quickly that it was one best left untouched.
17: Tears
Both Aang and Katara felt emotions with intensity most didn't, crying over one another's joys and pains equally, but neither expected the torrent of tears and emotion that came every time they did.
18: Speed
Aang liked to take life slowly, examining every facet of the world, and most found his innate curiosity annoying ("This isn't your first life, and it's certainly not going to be your last!"), but none found it more so frustrating as Katara when he took his time to examine every one of her details.
19: Wind
It was his element, and his responsibility to reform the nation that represented it, but Katara refused to let him carry the burden alone.
20: Freedom
He wondered if the weight of his conscience and his guilt would ever be lifted so he could be redeemed by the haunting souls of his murdered people, and it was only when he looked at Katara and their son that he could see the future and the hope that it was possible.
21: Life
Whenever she found his life in danger, Katara remembered someone telling her that the life of an Avatar was typically very short, and she spent a number of sleepless nights watching him, praying he would be the exception.
22: Jealousy
More so than the line of suitors waiting for her betrothal age with him, he was jealous of water because it caressed her when he couldn't, accompanied her when he couldn't, and comforted her when he couldn't.
23: Hands (related to Touch)
Aang didn't give a damn what she used on her hands, but he was grateful to whatever it was for making them so soft and comforting when he came home tired and weary.
24: Taste
Perhaps her cooking wasn't quite suitable to his usually indiscriminate palate when they first met, but Katara worked hard to learn what he liked so at least at meal times he tasted a little of his home.
25: Devotion
It had taken enormous loyalty to his nation and element, she thought, to pledge his life to the temple, dedicate himself to learn air bending, and maintain his honor when they were gone so as not to stain theirs, and she prayed every night to be able to come close to that in her devotion to him.
26: Forever
It was humbling to think that his life was insignificant in the greater scheme, that he was just one more in a long line of heroes that stretched into eternity, but her reassuring touch (on his handshoulderleglips) told him that what they had was at least as eternal as the Avatar spirit.
27: Blood
The only time he ever failed to keep Katara from reliving the horrors of blood bending was when she found him half-dead in the courtyard of the Fire Lord's palace in a pool of his own blood and she found a much more constructive use in the skill by forcing his wounds to seal.
28: Sickness
Aang had thought seriously about the promises he had made in his life before he broke the one to the temple in order to make a new one to Katara, pledging himself wholeheartedly to her, bad or good, sorrow or joy, sickness or health.
29: Melody
Stricken by the lullaby she was singing to a cranky baby (his son, she told him), Aang paused to listen to the words, leaning against the doorframe and humming along, though it had been over a century since he'd last heard it.
30: Star
Every night before he went to sleep, he reached toward the stars, casting his prayers up to them, drawing her face among the constellations, and when he was done, he rolled onto his side with renewed hope that wishing upon a star wasn't just for kids.
31: Home
With every temple they visited, Katara always sensed Aang's disappointment because there really were no more air benders, and he could hardly consider the hollow air temples home, so she secretly pledged that one day she would find him a home again.
32: Confusion
More often than he cared to admit, he woke up disoriented, still thinking he was living in the air temples before the war, and even after he and Katara were married he still had those panicked moments of confusion as he tried to patch together his sluggish memories.
33. Fear
Katara involuntarily found herself crying as she watched his (lifeless?) body plummet to the cold ground, and when she was holding him tight to her chest, staring at Azula's smirk, fear clenched her heart, stamping out any hope Aang had ever given her.
34: Lightning/Thunder (Fear, continued)
Frozen in a pool of water, crying over Aang's body, Katara barely heard Iroh's bellow ordering her to leave quickly, his booming voice becoming the thunder echoing Azula's deadly lightning.
35: Bonds
Aang was unwilling to be chained to anything, because it was the nature of the air nomads to refuse anything that could keep them from absolute freedom, so it meant a lot to Katara when he traded his nature for a ring she worried would feel like a noose to him.
36: Market
Shopping was a chore Katara enjoyed, and Aang only pretended to dread, because he knew as long as she thought he didn't like it, he would always get something out of it in the end.
37: Technology
Katara watched Aang destroy the steam-powered Fire Nation arsenal and worried because he seemed to have a particular hatred for those inanimate objects, but had she ever paused to think about it, she would have hated the technology that facilitated the massacre of her people, too.
38: Gift
Aang had made it a habit to bring Katara a gift at every opportunity, whether it was a rare piece of jewelry or a bunch of dandelions, and she cherished each of them, but none so much as the necklace he had made her, oblivious of meaning behind the object it was meant to replace.
39: Smile
After the end of the war, Katara put extra effort into making Aang smile whenever she could, because she saw the jaded look in his eyes every time he gazed into the horizon and couldn't stand how it made her feel.
40: Innocence
She worried after their first time that she had lost something precious that she would never regain, and agonized that she had done the same to him, but one look from him told her that nothing had really changed.
41: Completion
Some nights were sleeplessly squandered by Aang, who always felt lonely and incomplete without his people to support him, but when he was in those moods and Katara held him, he thought that perhaps she had been created by the spirits of his people just to complete him.
42: Clouds
Recalling their encounter with the fortuneteller, Aang once tried playing with the cloud formations in an amusing attempt to confess love to Katara, but she swore she saw some symbol of doom and refused to emerge from her tent, even when Aang revealed the trick.
43: Sky
The first few times Aang had taken her into the sky on his glider she had clung to him in terror, but she slowly began to enjoy flying and clung to him for a completely different reason.
44: Heaven
It was the greatest euphoria to wake up, body torn to hell, in her arms, because deep down he knew that he had died and taken the Avatar Spirit with him, and it had been her and her alone who had brought them all back.
45: Hell
For the moments he had joined the other Avatars in death, they all welcomed him as a hero, but the only thing he could think of was that he was the last one of all, and he had left a war-torn world filled with people who needed him, and the one person who he needed.
46: Sun
He reveled in the sun's warm glow, flipping through the air and rejoicing the coming of spring because it was the one that would be the beginning of re-growth in the world and that was enough to celebrate, even without the shy smile Katara was sporting from her perch.
47: Moon
Katara felt her heart sing with every full moon, a song to the Mother Moon, and even though Aang couldn't understand it, he sang rejoice with her.
48: Waves
There was an enormous surge of disapproval around the world when news of their betrothal travelled, but Aang didn't really see what the problem was, seeing as everyone had already known he planned to marry Katara and really didn't give a damn what they thought, anyway.
49: Hair
Katara understood Aang's desire to wear his tattoos as a proud memento of his people and his struggle to master air bending, but she was secretly pleased when he decided to grow out his hair again, because she found him extraordinarily handsome that way.
50: Supernova
When Aang came out of the Avatar State and all his strength had been expelled from him while trying to protect her, it was the least she could do to return the favor.