#the silena meta was an accident but i firmly believe she was really important and formative

[rynnaaurelius]

hylla ramirez-arellano, drew tanaka and frank zhang for the made up lore ask game! :D

(Made-up lore ask game is HERE)

Everything is under the cut because this post got long. Sorry for the delay, but I wanted to do justice, and this was fun as hell.

1. Hylla Ramirez-Arellano

*Note: I dislike Hylla and Reyna's canon backstory/relationship with their father for multiple reasons, so if anything here seems a bit weird, know that usually I put that part of canon through the shredder when thinking about Hylla and Reyna. I'm trying to keep things plausibly canon, but here we go.

Also, there's hints at world-building about the Amazons here, mostly because I refuse to conflate them with Jeff Bezos.

-Hylla began dreaming about Circe long before their father died. Of a mythical paradise, offering safety and power to a teenage girl who dreamed of so much more than staying home forever. Like her sister Reyna, Hylla was incredibly ambitious with inclinations to lead, but she had wanderlust in her blood that Reyna didn't. The conqueror's ambition, not that of the steward.

-Which was why, after the death of their father Julian, Hylla took Reyna, and, against Bellona's explicit advice to leave their home and go to San Francisco, she went to the Sea of Monsters, following the advice of Circe in her dreams.

-Reyna was traumatized and only half-aware of exactly what had happened to result in Julian's death. Hylla knew that if they went to America and joined the legion, her sister would only face more violence. Circe offered sanctuary and a chance for Hylla to learn what she needed to in order to protect her little sister.

-While incredibly controlling of them both, Circe kept her promises. During those years on the sorcereress's island, Hylla learned magic and stories of gods and monsters long forgotten by many demigods.

-Which is, of course, when Percy Jackson happened. The destruction of the island, Circe's death, escaping the clutches of pirates then the sisters adrift and Hylla struggling to figure out what to do next.

-Then Reyna began to dream of the wolf goddess. And the two girls, at Reyna's insistence, made their way to California.

-I'm not sure whether this is explicitly canon, one way or another, but I do firmly believe that Hylla came with Reyna to Wolf House, with every intention of eventually joining the legion alongside her sister.

-Lupa had other plans. Traveling together with Reyna, who, against Hylla's every effort to shelter her, was coming into their own as they fought monsters across the country, increasingly argued over what to do next, the sisters' relationship had begun to strain under both of them having extremely similar, strong personalities. Both of them were destined for leadership. Both of them would want to shape the legion in extremely different ways. Both of them would lead the Twelfth into civil war.

-But Reyna, no matter how much she may not understand Hylla at times, will not leave the only family she has left. So Lupa goes to Hylla and tells her, for both of them to live, to be safe, Hylla needs to leave Reyna behind. That the legion will protect her.

-And so she sends Hylla to the Amazons. In the process, Hylla and Reyna part on. . .not great terms.

-There, Hylla is an initial outcast. A Roman demigod, child of a goddess of war or no, and with no connections, no one to stand by her in a group dominated by Greeks, she struggles to assert herself.

-So, of course, she ends up running the fucking place. She befriends Kinzie, a fellow outcast for being the daughter of a river nymph and someone with little interest in the blade or arrow, she befriends [Redacted names of OCs before I go on an Amazon world-building rant].

-Then war comes. And the current queen of the Amazons makes it very clear that she is interested in what Kronos has to say.

-So Hylla, alongside Kinzie and those she's gathered as loyal to her, in order to protect New Rome from potential Amazon incursion, knowing that even if she challenged the current queen and won, no one would listen to a girl who the Greeks have no interest in obeying, does what she must.

-She finds the lost golden belt of Hippolyta, challenges the current queen for the right to the throne, and wins.

-The Titanomachy passes. There is, briefly, peace. Then Otrera returns. Then Percy Jackson returns, pleading to help her save Reyna, and all of Hylla's ghosts have returned.

-Hylla understands, when she is able to take a step back, that Percy and Annabeth were perfectly justified in destroying Circe's island. But was it worth shielding losing her home? Was it worth losing the ability to protect Reyna from their destiny as children of war, from Reyna being dragged before a Roman court for a murder that was for the sake of the victim as much as Reyna and Hylla's lives?

-Even after the war, she has no fondness for him. She's fond of Hazel, though, between the shared magic gifts and Hazel's ability to ride Arion. Gives her a standing offer to join the Amazons.

-After the war, Hylla has a string of boyfriends and girlfriends before finally figuring things out and riding off into the sunset with Kinzie.

2. Drew Tanaka

Note: Requisite warning that I dance dangerously close to non-canon here.

-Drew knew what Silena was doing.

-. . .okay, to be fair, most of Cabin Ten that had been there for more than, like, three days, knew what Silena was doing. Drew just happened to know more than most.

-But let's back up a second: Her father was an animation artist who had drawn the eye of the goddess of love, who had only been sent to camp after accidentally charmspeaking their landlord into not making them pay rent for six months when she was eight.

-The dracaenae showed up the next week. That's when Drew found out that she was a lot of things. A fighter? Nope. Her father was left hospitalized and she was swiftly bundled off by a satyr to Camp Half-Blood.

-From there, Drew quickly found herself being shoved into a box: The helpless, airheaded child of Aphrodite. No more scribbling in the margins of her father's work, no more smeared charcoal over her hands as he patiently teaches her how to write in his first language, how to draw an arm, no more harmless chatter with her classmates as they guess who likes who (Oh, they don't like that here. Not from her).

-More than that, she's the child of Aphrodite who couldn't be trusted. Even Silena Beauregard, gold, lovely just-competent-enough perfect Silena Beauregard, didn't have charmspeak as powerful as Drew. Drew, who was the mean little girl who just wanted to go home, and was struggling to control a power that everyone at camp looked down on with disdain at best, a terrifying fear in their eyes at worst.

-No one's going to blink twice twice if you say the new Aphrodite girl made you do it. The children of Aphrodite can't fight, everyone knows that. The children of Aphrodite just care about dying pretty, everyone knows that. Drew made the Stolls walk into the lake the day after her claiming, just because she could, everyone knows that.

(Silena died a hero for the good guys. Everyone would know that)

(Drew knew everyone knew that)

-It fell on Silena to help Drew control her charmspeak, to look at Drew and see what she would be. To tell her to remember that no matter what anyone said, she had power, and to use it carefully. To watch everyone around her and look out for her siblings, no matter the cost, and no matter how long it took Mom to turn around and see.

-The children of Aphrodite knew that.

-Now, it's war against the Titans. The mockery is less often but all the more intense, because Drew is so-so with a sword, slightly better with knives, and a lost cause with the bow. So she does what Silena taught her to do, before ever opening her mouth: she listens.

-And oh, does she hear. She hears the unclaimed, wasting away in Cabin Eleven, dying for parents who won't even acknowledge their children before death. She hears the claimed, lonely and buckling and dying.

-She hears her big sister working to end the war. Just not in favor of Olympus.

-In fairness, it doesn't take her skill and the empathic abilities of a child of Aphrodite to know that. You just have to know to look.

-And Drew turns a blind eye. Because her sister is working to save them. The only one in camp who has never looked at Drew with pity or fear, is working to protect her siblings, to stop the death. Unlike the vaunted children of Athena, the proud children of Ares, the clever children of Hermes--Silena sees. And she's doing something.

-Silena dies. Silena dies for camp.

-Drew, it turns out, can fight after all. At least, she can in the name of her dead sister.

-The war ends. Percy Jackson makes a promise that may make Silena's death worth it, not completely destroy Drew's sister's legacy.

-Then Percy Jackson disappears. And as the Battle of Manhattan becomes more of a ghost than a tangible presence at camp, Drew listens to everyone talk about her sister.

-"It was all Luke. Silena didn't know what she doing when she agreed to do it. She made the right choice in the end, even if she was a daughter of Aphrodite. You can't trust them to know what to do."

-Because, Drew knew, that was the problem. They couldn't admit exactly how Silena was able to deal so much damage. No one could admit that sweet, silly daughter of Aphrodite Silena Beauregard was able to bat her eyelashes and flick her hair and extract every promise of protection she needed from Luke Castellan. To get every battle plan ever made from beloved geniuses Annabeth Chase and Malcolm Pace and Clarisse La Rue.

-A child of Aphrodite playing them all for fools? One of camp's narcissists and cowards (and whores), running around and none of them suspecting jackshit? That Silena was well-aware that she was being used, and made her choices anyway? Nah.

-Silena was a hero, one who made the right choices, who died heroically. The innocent, kind girl manipulated by awful Luke Castellan who wasn't at all responsible for lives shattered and leaving destruction in her wake, who saw her own boyfriend die in it, and let her tears fall across a closed mouth. Absolutely not.

-So, really. When all is said and done, is it that unreasonable that Drew had her cabin close ranks? That unable to grieve anyone other than a shiny lie, she embraced being the camp bitch? if she's going to be remembered as that, fine: She wants it.

-Here is the lesson Drew was taught, years ago when she was being blamed for every little crime in camp, and the only people she could be around was her siblings. This is the truth of a child of Aphrodite: Might as well be hated for something you've actually done (Better than to be loved for something you never did).

And so, when all is said and done: Can you blame someone for not being Piper McLean's biggest fan, when she professed to know the truth of being one of Aphrodite's children better than Drew Tanaka?

3. Frank Zhang

Note: I'm incapable of being strictly canon, so again, some of this comes close to incompatible with canon.

-Okay. I get why Frank is from British Columbia. I really, actually do.

(It's for geographical reasons. BC is right in the path of the Alaska quest, so it's very easy for the Son of Neptune trio to visit his home)

-But also, Frank is Québécois. Emily's parents chose to live in Montreal, and came back to British Columbia, back to Frank's grandma, when Emily enlisted and was going to go on tour.

-This is mostly because A, I'm a great believer in polyglot Frank Zhang, and B, the unparalleled hilarity of him speaking to Hazel, her panicking because what the fuck happened to French while she was dead, and then they meet Piper and realize, nah, Québécois French is just Like That.

(Also, BC is really fucking English Canadian province, and there's not much linguistic reason for Hazel to be confused by his French unless either her French is a dialect extremely specific to where she lived, e.g: Black 1930s neighborhood in New Orleans, or Frank learned Québécois French, and that's a dialect specific to Quebec, halfway across the fucking country--plus, there's not much reasons for him to learn it when he's already learning Mandarin or Cantonese at home, in addition to English at school, and BC has a large enough East Asian immigrant population that it's very likely his grandma might've had him learning it in class)

(Can you tell that my family's Canadian yet?)

-Anyway. I firmly believe that Frank was a little arsonist when he was younger.

-Not, like, anything law-breaking, because he was a small child trying to make his grandma and mom proud, but he was a seven-year-old very interested in what Makes Things Go Boom. And that meant fire, and furthermore, his family all having massive heart attacks every time he came near a fire, because Stick.

-He was very careful! As careful as someone his age could be. Very orderly experiments, but small child and fire do not mix.

-So they tried to re-direct this into something less inclined to end in near-death experiences, and that meant archery. Frank really took to it, and started winning prizes in competitions.

(he wasn't particularly inclined to, but the Mars heritage meant that Frank was a pretty dab hand at just about any weapon or fighting style he decided to study. He just really liked the bow)

-Frank got bullied in school for being fat and someone who easily cries (Because we project here, folks). This lasted until he realized that other people were getting bullied, and his grandma advised him to be a dragon to protect them.

-This is absolutely why he turns into a dragon at the beginning of MoA to protect Piper and Jason. It's the spirit of the thing.

-Actually, on the whole, Frank has a pretty happy pre-Camp Jupiter childhood. His family periodically argues over whether they should tell him about his heritage before he turns eighteen/Emily potentially dies, but it's a relatively normal one, considering where he lives in somewhere able to protect him from monsters.

-Then his mom dies. His mom dies, halfway across the world, in the name of a war that part of Frank's subconscious has disdainful feelings towards, and everything in his life shatters.

-His grandma tells him about his father, the day of the funeral, when he asks why he can't be bothered to come and pay his respects.

-So Frank goes to Camp Jupiter, and is. . .more than a little miserable, to be honest. He wants to do things. He wants to meet his father.

-He wants to not think about his mom, when he's in San Francisco and alone.

-Frank's grandmother did tell him, the day he left for Camp Jupiter: What is, is, Fai. You can embrace the pain in, acknowledge why it exists, or you can deny it and have it consume you. Accept it and wield it for Rome.

-The whole ancestor-may-have-done-a-natural-disaster thing puts a damper in any aspirations he has within the legion, when he's working to not get executed or harassed over it (Of course, Frank has, uh, questions. About what kind of heritage would be responsible for that. These guys aren't a big fan of Neptune and Frank has enough problems).

-It might be for the best, to be honest. Because he meets Hazel, who's nervous smile is infectious, who seems ready to jump if Frank were to say boo.

-He doesn't, of course. He might say so to some of the people who keep staring at Hazel like she's a ghost, though.

-Grief, Frank finds, isn't helpful. But it's knowledgeable. He sees the ghost of Jason Grace, of the strange way everyone stares at Hazel, brave Hazel who saves his life from the stampeding herd of unicorns, Hazel who looks at Scipio, Reyna's Pegasus with longing she doesn't look like she thinks she deserves to have, and isn't afraid.

-It's hard to be afraid of death, when it's alongside you every day in the form of his mother's ring and a dinky little stick.

(After Alaska, after meeting Percy Jackson, after meeting Nico di Angelo and Jason Grace and witnessing how hard those two can brood, Frank finds that it's easier to jerk Percy out of his moods, where he stares out at the world like he believes the sky will fall if Percy sits down, if he asks, badly-hidden smirk tugging at his mouth, if he's allowed legacy membership into the Greek Big Three Angst Club)

(He tells Nico that Percy assigned him death-cousin babysitting to prevent said brooding, after he and Annabeth fall into Tartarus, and the bark of laughter let out by the son of Hades makes half the Argo II's crew jump)