Disclaimer: I don't own Percy Jackson and the Olympians

This fic would not have existed without the encouragement of Stereden, who has also done a podfic of it, which can be found in its AO3 crosspost /works/57201739 or on my tumblr tsarisfanfiction!

When Lee opened his eyes, everything felt like a dream. He wasn't quite sure what did, whether it was the past two years, or his current situation, but Luke Castellan was sitting next to him, lips quirked into a lopsided smirk so familiar it hurt, and despite everything, Lee missed his friend.

Leaning back against something, quite possibly the trunk of a tree, mind slightly hazy in that way a lazy day could spark with the older boy next to him felt like a dream come true, like Luke hadn't tried to kill Percy, torment Chris, or any of the other horrors now associated with the son of Hermes. Lee hoped it was, hoped he'd finally woken up from the thralls of a nightmare that had been haunting him for too long.

"Good morning, sleeping beauty," Luke teased, and Lee lazily rolled his head to one side, still a bit drowsy, to give him a mock scowl, before something started to niggle at him as not right.

Lee didn't sleep during the day, but Luke hadn't been lying when he called it morning. There was no sunlight, though. No warmth of his father's chariot beaming down on him. Behind his back was cool stone, not firm yet supple bark, and torchlight danced around them. Lee couldn't move, either, his head free to turn but the rest of his body stuck in position and making the skin of his neck tug as he tried to better face Luke.

Luke, whose voice had been a little too deep, too rough for the older boy Lee knew. Whose eyes weren't blue, the way they always had been, but a searing, molten gold that hurt to look at. Whose smirk wasn't light-hearted or friendly, but cruel as torchlight sent harsh flickering shadows over the scar on his face.

His dawning horror must have shown on his face, because Luke laughed, a horrible, grating sound that mocked him, found humour at his own expense. Luke never laughed like that, never found someone else's horror a source of amusement.

This wasn't Luke.

Not-Luke reached out and ruffled his hair in a mockery of how Luke used to do it when they were younger, when he was the big brother of the camp that brought everyone into his orbit, even Lee. Lee had loved Luke, trusted him and found comfort in his steady presence and quick wit.

Lee tried to pull away, but his body didn't have enough autonomy to escape the pseudo-brotherly gesture, too sluggish even if his mind was waking quickly.

"Quick on the uptake," Not-Luke noted, the facsimile of Luke's voice sounding almost approving, beneath the sheer amusement that permeated from every pore of Lee's current, unwanted, companion. "But that was only to be expected, of course." He took his hand back, leaning back against the hard wall and almost slipping out of Lee's periphery. Lee had to force his head around to keep him in view, and was able to catch the movement as he lazily made his way to his feet. "He hid you from me, you know," Not-Luke continued, and while his voice was light there was something darker behind it. "What you can do."

Lee went cold, could feel the hairs on his arms standing up on end as a shiver ran down his spine. Not-Luke paced around until he was standing in front of him, and Lee looked up, meeting the molten golden eyes staring out of Luke's face. Despite their colour, there was no warmth to them at all.

"The living lie detector," Not-Luke breathed, words enough of a murmur that even surrounded by rocks, in what could well be a cavern – Lee's brain was gaining enough clarity again to start trying to think, but it wasn't thinking anything helpful, or nice, right then – there was no echo. No-one else to hear the words. "He told me a lot about camp, about the campers he knew, but he neglected to mention that little detail, the foolish boy. It could have been… inconvenient."

Not-Luke said inconvenient with weight and intention, as though it was both an understatement yet also exactly what he meant.

"People might have died, if certain lies were caught, you see," he continued, but it was like he was talking about the weather, not people's lives. Light-hearted, a minor inconvenience like clouds blocking out the sun for a few hours in the afternoon. "A failed spy is no use to anyone, wouldn't you agree?"

The pause was expectant, as though Lee was expected to reply, but his brain was still a little too foggy, his tongue too sluggish to form words. He didn't want to, anyway. Not-Luke was a monster, wearing his former friend's face, and Lee was doing his best to keep the realisation from clicking into place, because he knew, somewhere inside him, who Not-Luke was, and what it meant.

He knew, but he refused to acknowledge it, because acknowledging it meant-

No.

His silence didn't seem to bother Not-Luke, though, as the expectant pause passed in silence before he started to talk again.

"But no matter," he said. "I discovered everything he was keeping from me in time, so no harm done." Luke's lopsided smirk was back again, except its aura was nothing but evil. If Lee could move, he would've shied away from it, but his body was too restrained to so much as flinch. "In fact, this has turned out even better than I could have expected." Not-Luke crouched down fluidly in front of him. "You're mine, now."

Something in the words, in the realisation, helped his body break through the fog and he recoiled back as far as he could go, fighting against his body to make it move.

Metal clanked and something chafed against his wrists, digging in sharply as he tugged frantically.

Not-Luke didn't even try to stop him, watching him with the eyes of a monster, the eyes of a predator, a lazy smirk crossing his face. "If you want to injure yourself, be my guest," he said, leaning back in a smooth laze that was so much Luke that it hurt. "I don't need your body to be intact."

It was the callousness of it all that got to Lee, the disinterest in causing pain, and the disinclination to stop pain, either. There were other things, too, things that he didn't want to be thinking about, and the growing pain in his wrists was a great distraction to stop the thoughts from swirling and forming.

Not-Luke made no effort to stop him, waiting patiently as Lee's still-groggy body drained of energy until struggling against the metal that kept him in place was beyond him.

He was either drugged or concussed, Lee belatedly realised, his sluggish brain finally putting together pieces. He didn't know how he'd ended up here, in a stone cavern with metal binding him in place and Not-Luke looking at him with all the self-assuredness of someone who knew they were going to get their way in the end and were content to sit and wait until things fell into their lap, but it was getting pretty obvious that it hadn't been his choice, and that his freedom wasn't making itself known any time soon.

As the last of Lee's energy drained away, leaving him sagging in the harsh restraints, Not-Luke leaned forwards and gripped his shoulder tightly. "You're mine now, Lee Fletcher," he said, Lee's name falling from his lips like oil. "You and your ability to detect lies."

Lee stiffened. No. He wasn't some tool to use. He'd kept his ability secret for several reasons, and one of them was this. People who knew what he could do used him as a gauge, even if they didn't mean to. Ever since he'd found out, Michael glanced over at him when he wasn't sure who to trust, and Lee would never begrudge his younger brother the security of knowledge, but it was different, with him. He didn't view Lee as a lie detector first and a person second.

Someone like this was far, far worse.

"Go to Tartarus," he rasped.

"He speaks!" Not-Luke exclaimed sarcastically. It was almost a Luke-like reaction, if the voice wasn't wrong. "I was beginning to wonder if you'd forgotten how."

Lee's spine prickled with the sense of a lie, although he thought he probably would have been able to pick that lie out even without his ability.

Not-Luke's mouth twisted even further, and his eyes burned. "And no, I won't," he said, voice suddenly dark and dangerous, and forcibly stripping away all of Lee's forceful delusions and not thinking about its. "After all, I've only just got out of there." The hand tightened on Lee's shoulder, fingertips digging in forcefully enough that he wondered if his clavicle was about to snap under the pressure. "And I don't plan on ever going back. Luke thought you were a smart boy, Lee. You know who I am."

Inhuman eyes locked with his, out of place in Luke's face as the gold flickered in ways closer to fire than anything a human's eyes could ever do, and there was something profoundly unnatural about the way Luke's lips twisted, contorting the scar into shapes Lee had never seen it make before. There was nothing soft about the expression, just as painful and cruel as the thumb digging into the vulnerable skin above his clavicle as impatience settled in.

" Don't you."

Lee didn't want to reply, didn't want to say it because if he did then it would be real, but the grip on his shoulder was relentless and even if he was wanted alive, he didn't have to be in one piece to recognise a lie, and he knew he wasn't the only one aware of that right then.

Talking, moving his jaw, still felt like a Herculean task with his tired muscles and his brain fog, but Lee didn't have a choice so he persevered and forced the name out, trying to ignore the fact that his eyes felt damp and that something warm was crawling down his cheekbone.

"Kronos," he mumbled awkwardly, feeling the weight of not just the name but the acknowledgement of what it meant, that Kronos looked like Luke, why Kronos looked like Luke. "You're Kronos."

The grip on his shoulder vanished suddenly, and his head sagged forwards, immediately focusing on his legs instead of his companion, but he couldn't block his ears.

"Clever boy," Kronos praised. "That's right; it's me."

Movement in Lee's periphery had his head snapping across to look at it on instinct, but it was only Kronos in Luke's body standing up, dusting himself off as though the cavern they were in was dirty – it was, of course it was, and with one realisation forced into existence, the others were falling into place like the world's worst game of dominoes.

"I'll let you get settled in," Kronos said, and in some situations those words would be kind, but they weren't here, never here. Kronos didn't know kind. "We'll resume our acquaintance later, once you've had time to think." He split Luke's face into another grin, one with too many teeth to be friendly. "I look forwards to getting to know you, Lee."

Restrained, and still with the faint strains of fog in his head even though it felt like that should have been long blown away by the crumbling realisations, Lee couldn't do anything except watch him walk away, through an open doorway.

He didn't even bother to shut it behind him.

Lee's breathing picked up, choking a little on the silent tears that had finished making their way down his face and instead fallen into his mouth when he hadn't been paying attention. He was trapped. The open door taunted him cruelly, but he still couldn't move, and even if he could…

Kronos was out there, and Lee had no chance against a titan, or even Luke's swordsmanship, if Luke was still in there, too. Lee couldn't tell if he was; his body moved like Luke's, but that could just be muscle memory, and Kronos had spoken about him in past tense.

He'd only told one lie, the stupid, sarcastic one. Everything else he'd said had been categorically, awfully, true.

Gods, Lee was so, so screwed.

He hadn't known Kronos took prisoners. None of them had even considered it, not even Chiron. Demigods disappeared but it wasn't a secret that most of them had either idolised Luke or had their own grudges against the gods. Their betrayals made sense even if they hurt. The others that had disappeared, who hadn't been known grudge-holders or devout followers of Luke, had all been summer campers that simply hadn't come back.

They'd all assumed they'd either decided to quit camp and the brewing war, or been killed. It wasn't that unusual.

But what if Lee wasn't the only prisoner? What if some of those disappearances had been kidnappings? What if Kronos had been picking them up, one by one, when they were alone and vulnerable? Lee didn't think any of them had stood out for something they could do, but then, he could count on the fingers of one hand how many people still at camp knew about his truth-sensing, and two of them were Chiron and Mr D.

He wasn't a summer camper, though. In fact, Lee couldn't remember the last time he'd left camp. The last time he'd gone shopping, he supposed, but that hadn't been recent. They'd all got more paranoid about leaving camp since last summer, when the barriers around camp had fallen and they had spent the entire time defending their own borders.

They'd still been defending them this time, and the foggy haze in his mind shifted a little bit more as he remembered the attack.

The Labyrinth. Chris, insensate and hurting. Clarisse, trying so hard to still pretend she was fine despite the new, ugly and knotted scars under her clothes, where Lee had done his best to keep her alive. Percy and Annabeth and Tyson and Grover, and the son of Poseidon crashing his own funeral after they'd finally given up hope that he'd somehow survived.

The frantic, panicked warning that the armies were coming now. That they had to get their defences up and ready for battle because it was real, now. No more hypothetical what-ifs, wondering if Luke – oh gods, Luke – was going to lead an army into the heart of their camp. The army had been coming and Lee had been there with the other head counsellors, organising everyone and doing his best to keep his siblings out of the way as though there was any such thing as out of the way in battle.

There wasn't in capture the flag, and this was going to be worse than capture the flag, because the monsters would be aiming to kill, and-

Lee remembered the battle starting, remembered sending Michael into the trees with their youngest siblings, to keep them as safe as he possibly could. He didn't remember anything else.

Gods.

He must have been snatched, somehow, during the battle. He wasn't injured, outside of the foggy head, so it was probably near the start. Dragged into the Labyrinth, away from camp, and into this place. This cell, even if the door was open.

Lee tried to wrench himself free again, but chains clinked and held him tight. It finally occurred to him to look, and see how he was secured, although it probably wouldn't make a difference. Lee wasn't a Hermes kid, nor an escape artist in general. He was a musician, an archer, a healer.

A human lie detector.

None of those would get him out of chains.

Still, he looked, and immediately wished he hadn't, because there was suspecting he couldn't get out and then there was knowing it.

Thick, iron manacles clamped around his wrists, but they were embedded in the stone walls that surrounded him so he couldn't even budge them from the awkward way they were pinned. Matching cuffs clamped his ankles, trussed together and then secured by longer chains back to the wall again. He'd lost his shoes, and his socks, too, and it belatedly occurred to Lee that they were cool, against the stone floor.

Then he realised he wasn't wearing his clothes.

He wasn't naked, thank the gods, but the pants he could see weren't his, and when he looked down at his chest, the familiar orange of a camp t-shirt had been replaced with a purple one.

And his camp necklace was gone.

Well. This was supposed to be short. It is not short (it has ended up being seventy one (71) chapters long), and as usual with my longfics, fully written. This is actually the longest continuous story I've ever written at just over 200k words! I hope you enjoy the ride :D

Thanks for reading!
Tsari