in the story, lucky comes across elizabeth webber (herbst) after she has been raped, and confides his upset to his father before his hostile half-brother nikolas cassadine (then christopher) reveals to him that luke had raped laura years prior. the betrayal lucky feels from having the truth kept from him has a drastic impact on the character, especially because of how close he had been with his parents. having moved around often, their relationship had become more like best friends than parent-child. lucky struggles to understand his parents' actions. jackson described lucky in 1999 as: "a black-and-white personality. he either loves or hates people. he doesn't know about balance." lucky's relationship with each of his parents suffers; he thinks his mother is in denial about her attack, and is even more angry with his father for keeping the secret while lucky was coping with elizabeth's assault. lucky moves out and his independence grows further as he crashes at various places around port charles while holding odd jobs and continuing his schoolwork. as a result of the ordeal, honesty becomes important to lucky; jackson explained to "soap opera digest" in december 1998: "he doesn't want to do what his parents did as far as keeping secrets from each other and lying. he's pretty set on doing things differently when it comes to the decisions he makes in his life."