Curate, connect, and discover
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People came easily to Luke.
That was not to say people generally liked him, necessarily. Some would say he had his father’s charm and his mother’s once beautiful features, and that was why he’d always attracted a crowd, but Luke hadn’t been his parents’ son in a long while. He was every bit the thief his father was and, like his mother, could see far past what was presented, but everything he’d built for himself had been from the ground up.
Even by demigod standards, Luke was the son of one of the lamest gods in Olympus- he wasn’t great with his hands like Annabeth, and he definitely couldn’t control lightning the way Thalia could. All Luke had was people. He could tell, for the most part, what buttons to push to upset, to anger, to flatter, to confuse; that was Luke’s talent. He was a pickpocket, a sleight of hand artist, and like most cynical, petty crooks, nothing slipped past him.
Luke understood how people worked. Understood what the flutter of an eyelid or a trembling lip meant, understood just how much tension in the brow separated grief and aggression. Above all, Luke understood that people were always exactly as they were not- playing a game of charades against the rest of the world as though that might protect them, in some way, from her jagged edges.
He’d always been too clever for his own good.
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