"Who are you?"
"Look deep inside you," the man with the crooked smile says, "and maybe you'll see."
Jason scrunches his eyes together, peering at the sandy blond hair and dark blue eyes. Familiar, he looks familiar. But he doesn't know—he has no idea. "I—I can't. Who are you?"
It takes minutes for him to answer, minutes Jason knows must be hours outside of his dream. "Luke, Luke Castellan."
And then he remembers. And then he knows. The boy from the pictures in the Zeus cabin, with the smile and the spark in his eyes. The boy with the arm around his sister and Annabeth, the one who had been family to them (and maybe, deep inside him, he knows that this boy was a replacement for him). And then he remembers something else. "Aren't you . . . aren't you Kronos?"
He chuckles. "No, Kronos is gone—, and good riddance to him. I'm still here as myself. I died as Luke Castellan, I'm in the afterlife as Luke Castellan . . ."
"Elysium?"
"Yes. Thanks to Nico Di Angelo. But that's not why I'm here."
"You want me too—"
"Take care of her, Jason Grace. I—I couldn't—she deserved—deserves—someone who could stay. She deserves you. I loved her, I love her, but I can't really, not anymore, it's just you now, I'm dead, and she's immortal, and right now all she's got is you—"
"I get it," Jason cuts him off.
Luke glares and he can catch a little bit of the traitor in him, in the coldness of his eyes, of the lack of the spark from the pictures Thalia used to cry over. "Do you?"
"Yes—"
He wakes up.