AN Let this stand as a warning to all mortals out there. Never doubt the wonderful Miss-Li-Ding on whether a word is an actual word or not. (Scrabbled is, in fact, an actual word.) I owed her 500 words and here they are, presented for your enjoyment. I threw out most of her prompts (accidentally) and instead ran with this. Reviews and ideas always welcome. And I may have borrowed the whole, grief = love thing from Clichesbullet but it works so well...
As surprising as it may seem I do not in fact own Percy Jackson and the Olympians or any of the characters. Rick Riordan does. If I owned them Octavian would be called an Auspex. ;)
How To Deal With Your Crush
The First Stage: Denial
Silena first read the article in May. It came with her to camp so she could reread it and prove it wrong. She would double check it, triple check it; she'd check it a hundred times because there was no way that LemonFashion! was correct this time.
'You throw out any possibility that he could like you and that you could like him.' Of course there wasn't any possibility that they could like one another! He was a son of Hephaestus and she was a daughter of Aphrodite; they didn't share the same social circles or anything!
The Second Stage: Anger
'You are angry with yourself, your crush; everyone. You explode any time someone mentions their name.' She wasn't angry, Silena reasoned as she once again skimped from giving her mother any offerings during dinner time. Silena was just annoyed that her mother was deciding to play with the heart-strings of one of her own daughters.
She surmised that Aphrodite was a horrible mother as she gave out love-charms to hapless campers. Other demigods were supposed to fall in love with muscular, vexatious, handsome Beckendorfs, not children of the love goddess. It wasn't fair at all!
The Third Stage: Bargaining
A sigh escaped Silena's lips as she strolled past the Hephaestus cabin once more. If she hadn't gone out of her way to be a nice daughter of Aphrodite, would all of this have happened? Her siblings seemed much more at peace as they went from fling to fling. They strung along broken hearts behind them and felt better than she, the nice one.
'Questions starting off with 'if only' plague your mind. You wonder if things would have gone differently if only...' If only- no. Silena marched on, stubbornly refusing to comply with that article.
The Fourth Stage: Depression
Silena decided that she was a defeatist, having learnt about defeatism last semester. Free will was an illusion, the gods controlled everything, yaddi yaddi yaddah. 'You are depressed. Nothing is worth the effort. Everything is hopeless.'
She knew that this wasn't supposed to be happening. Daughters of Aphrodite never became lethargic concerning matters of love; her defence of the emotion against the Hunters proved that. Then why… Why couldn't she find the energy to even get up out of bed now? Her complexion was probably horrible but for once in her life she did not care.
The Fifth Stage: Acceptance
Who said that children of Aphrodite didn't have to like children of Hephaestus? It was completely stupid! Silena couldn't believe that she hadn't wanted to fall for Charles for such a shallow reason.
The demigod changed her hair and eye colour offhandedly then rushed to the cabin of Athena, smiling truly after a long time of fake grins and downright grimaces. It was the day before the fireworks and Charlie needed a little push, he was so shy after all.
'You have realised that you are in love. You focus on the positive and embrace it.'