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!

"Good morning, Lee!"

Lee jerked awake. He didn't remember falling asleep, but Kronos was squatting in front of him, a twisted grin on Luke's face. It was a familiar one, almost, just a hint too dark to ever be something Luke had worn, and Lee was abruptly reminded of his former friend's fate.

"Breakfast time," the titan said, in the same rise and shine tone Lee used on his cabin, although he never needed to use it to wake his siblings up – just to get them dressed and out the cabin. Being morning people didn't stop a lot of them from wanting to laze around in their pyjamas rather than get dressed. Those were two very different things.

A hand loosely brushed over his palm, setting the nerves on fire , and Lee couldn't hold back the gasp. "I see Reuben wasn't happy with you yesterday," Kronos said conversationally. "Far it be from me to quell his aggressive nature, but this would be so much more pleasant if you were in one piece. I'm a busy titan, so I can't spend the time to feed you the way Aquila did, but you're no good to anybody starved."

Fingers trickled from his palm to his wrist, and with a movement and a click that was too loud in the cavern, the metal cracked open. Lee's hand immediately fell limply to his side. Kronos did the same on the other side, and pins and needles erupted in both hands as blood started to circulate again. Clumsily, Lee started to rub at his wrists, wincing where they were bruised and chafed. A bowl of soup and some bread – notably less stale-looking than the previous affair – clinked as it was set on the stone next to him.

"Eat up," Kronos told him. "If it's not all eaten by the time I return, I will make you eat it all. Do you understand?"

That was a threat, and the searing absence of a lie told Lee it was one he would follow through without hesitation. Lee nodded.

"Good boy." Kronos ruffled his hair again in a painfully Luke-like action, and fluidly rose to his feet again. "I will be back soon."

He swept from the room without a single ominous remark about how Lee wouldn't be able to escape, but despite undoing the manacles around his wrists, he still didn't close the door behind him, and that said it loud and clear all the same.

Lee sighed, and hissed as rubbing his wrists provoked friction on a rawer patch of skin. He grimaced and inspected his wrists; both of them were ringed with the colour of fresh bruises, small patches rubbed red. There wasn't any blood yet, but it was only a matter of time.

He cradled the hand with the scratched palm awkwardly in the other, and sang a low healing hymn under his breath. It closed up the thin line, and eased the aching in his wrist. He wasn't powerful enough to vanish the bruises entirely, but even a little relief was something, and he repeated it with the other wrist.

Part of him hoped Apollo would also notice the hymns. He'd never been sure exactly how in tune with his children's healing his father was, but as they were hymns to him, surely he had to at least notice whenever they used them?

Kronos hadn't left him with any cutlery. The bowl was roughly hewn out of stone so there was no chance of breaking it and turning it into a makeshift weapon, either. The thought briefly crossed Lee's mind that it was poisoned, or drugged, but Kronos wanted him alive and if he wanted to use him as a lie detector then he needed him coherent enough to hear something.

Then Lee's stomach grumbled, reminding him that aside from some stale bread, he'd had nothing to eat since the morning of the battle – and he had no idea how many days had passed since then. Probably not many, because his body would be far more broken down by now if he'd missed that many meals.

He took the risk and grasped the bread in one still slightly trembling hand, dunking it into the liquid. It still wasn't fresh bread, but it soaked up enough of the thin liquid. After the previous meal, if Lee could even call it that, it even tasted decent. It wasn't amazing, or even anything close to the food back at camp, but it was edible.

It didn't take him long to finish the bread, and he cradled the stone bowl in his still unsteady hands to drink the rest of it, clamping down on it hard enough that he wouldn't let it shake and spill. He still felt some of it dribble down his chin, and hurriedly set the bowl down so he could catch it.

Wiping it with his wrist was instinct, but the bruises protested and forced a wince out of him as he licked them clean of soup droplets. His skin had the faint tang of iron, which he hoped was only from the manacles.

With the soup bowl drained dry, Lee set it aside and started to look at the restraints still clamped around his ankles. There were enough links of chain between them that he could, in theory, walk, although it would be awkward and the trip hazard was high. The other chains, securing both of them to the wall, stopped any chance he had of simply walking out of the open door.

He still shifted, pulling his knees up towards him and poking at the metal. He hadn't even realised how numb he'd got until he moved and his butt made itself known with a vengeance. Suddenly the bones that usually never bothered him when he sat were complaining and refused to settle into anything comfortable on the stone floor. He winced and stretched, arching his back to try and alleviate cramping muscles, before returning to his inspection of the restraints.

There wasn't any obvious way to open them. The chains that lead back towards the walls looped through hoops on the outside of the manacles, but each one led to a separate section of wall – Lee couldn't reach either one without being pulled short by the other. That seemed to be the obvious weak point; the other, shorter, chain seemed to be welded firmly to the cuffs, and if there was a hinge in them, it wasn't obvious.

With a sinking feeling, Lee recognised the work of a cabin nine smith. Short of cutting off his own feet, he wasn't getting himself out of them – and Kronos hadn't left him anything remotely capable of drastic self-mutilation even if he was that desperate.

He was desperate, but not that desperate.

Turning his head to give the cuffs embedded in the walls their own cursory inspection, he realised that they were the same. Kronos hadn't had any difficulty opening them, but he was in the body of a son of Hermes, and Luke had always been good at opening locks.

Lee wrapped his arms around his knees, and propped his chin on them. He wasn't going to get free as long as he was manacled; there was no point wasting energy. If he was going to have any chance of getting out, he was going to have to wait until he actually had a chance.

Kronos took longer than Lee expected to come back, although Lee wasn't complaining. The less he saw of the titan, the better. Kronos couldn't use him if he wasn't there . Unfortunately, eventually Luke's face reappeared, with the wrong eyes and expressions that weren't quite right.

He didn't acknowledge Lee as he swept into the room as though it was his palace, heading straight for the discarded bowl and lifting it up. Molten gold eyes surveyed the floor, as though checking that Lee hadn't just tipped it all out. Lee didn't doubt that if he had done that, Kronos would have found a way to force him to eat it anyway. The titan was not known for being merciful.

"Good boy," Kronos grinned. He knelt down next to Lee, a facsimile of Luke's easy-going, caring self. The gleam in his eyes was all wrong, though, and Lee shuffled away. Like a striking viper, Kronos's arm snatched out and gripped Lee's arm like a vice, tugging him back towards him.

Lee struggled, trying to break his grip, but while he and Luke were of similar builds and strength, despite being in Luke's body, Kronos seemed to still have access to the immovable strength of an immortal. He didn't show any signs of effort as he forced Lee's arm to extend, holding it until his wrist was clearly visible.

"You healed yourself," he commented. "I expected as such."

"Let go ," Lee insisted, not giving up. He wasn't desperate enough to find a way to hack off parts of his body, but he was desperate enough to throw up as much of a fight as he possibly could.

Kronos grinned at him, showing too many teeth. "No." He pushed Lee's arm back, applying more and more pressure until Lee was forced to cave or have the limb snap, and forced it back inside the manacle.

Lee thrashed, clawing at the imprisoning hand with his currently free one. His nails raked white lines on Luke's skin, but Kronos didn't even glance at them as he closed the cuff with no apparent effort, the loud click signifying his returning restraint.

He was even more helpless to stop the second wrist being re-restrained, until he was back in his original position, wrists cuffed to the wall and ankles never released in the first place, and breathing hard from his attempts to not be re-secured. Kronos didn't even have a hair out of place.

"Now that you're fed, I think it's time we began," the titan said, straightening up and stepping back. "Let's start with a game you must be very familiar with, and no doubt the reigning champion of." He snapped the fingers of his free hand, and several figures ambled into the room.

Some, Lee recognised. Near the front, sneering, were the trio that had already visited him. Others were faces from camp, faces that had been steadily disappearing for the past two years, and he'd known that they'd gone to join Kronos, but it hurt to see the proof in front of him. Worse were the adults, ones he vaguely remembered from years gone by, who he'd never known had a problem with the gods, or certainly not enough of one to rejoin the demigod world when they'd made it to adulthood and cohabiting in the world with mortals without a problem.

There was also a handful that he didn't recognise, both adults and teenagers. Almost all of them had some sort of thick lines on their forearm, like Reuben's SPQR and dove.

"Two truths and a lie," Kronos announced, and Lee's heart sank. He'd known that Kronos wanted him for his ability, but he'd still hoped that, somehow, it wouldn't get involved. "Each one of my volunteers is going to tell you two truths and a lie. Your job is to tell me which one is the lie."

Volunteers. The thought that any of the gathered demigods had volunteered to take part in tormenting Lee made him ill. Part of him hoped that they had been pressganged into it, that they hadn't willingly put their hand up to be complicit in all this, but another part of him didn't want that, because it meant that Kronos was forcing them.

He looked away from Kronos and his piercing, heartless golden eyes, and scanned the faces of the demigods in front of him. The ones he didn't recognise, and the trio, met his gaze in a clear challenge; none of them cared about Lee at all. He didn't want to wonder how many of them had been close to Marcus, but his mind started to wander in that direction anyway.

Reuben grinned at him, but it was a vicious thing, like a predator eyeing its prey. Lee didn't meet his gaze for long, skipping over to instead lock eyes with Alana, a blank-faced daughter of Demeter who had simply never come back to camp after leaving the same summer as Luke. He remembered her as a fair, gentle enough girl, although she had a wicked sharp tongue when she was angry.

He'd always thought they'd got on well enough, but there was nothing in her gaze to suggest that she hadn't truly volunteered herself to take part in what Lee was certain was going to be a very personalised degree of torture. There wasn't even a hint of remorse in her eyes as she met his eyes evenly.

Lee wasn't prepared for how much that hurt.

Kronos waved one hand, a sharp gesture that dragged Lee's attention unwillingly back towards him. "Aquila," he announced. "You go first."

The demigod from earlier, who'd fed him and threatened to force it down his throat, took a step forwards, towering over Lee from where he was trapped on the ground and looking down at him disdainfully.

"My pronouns are they/them," they said, with no fanfare. Somewhere in the back of his mind, Lee figured that was good to know, even if they didn't seem to have any friendly intentions towards him at all. "I'm a legacy of Vulcan." Lie ran down his back, cool and prickly, and Lee carefully didn't react, even if he didn't know what they even meant by legacy, and why would they call Hephaestus Vulcan? "I'm seventeen years old."

He could feel all the eyes on him, like a bug under a microscope.

All of these people now knew about his ability, even the campers he'd known for years and carefully never let on to. They knew and now they were scrutinising him, waiting for him to admit it.

Kronos' eyes had never left him. "The lie?" he prompted.

Lee was not being used that easily. Despite his misgivings, he met Kronos' eyes directly and refused to look away, even when the molten gold burned out of Luke's face. "No."

One of Luke's eyebrow's raised, a look of sarcastic disbelief that would have been heart-achingly familiar if it was actually Luke doing it. As it was, it was more like heart- breaking ly familiar, because it looked like Luke but it wasn't, it was Kronos, and there was no disguised fondness peeking out from blue eyes. "No?" Kronos repeated, a dangerous note in his voice. "It wasn't a yes or no question, Lee. Which one was the lie?"

Lee set his jaw, drawing every ounce of stubbornness he could eke out of his body and when that wasn't enough, copied more from younger siblings when they dug their heels in and refused to do as they were told.

"I'm not saying," he said firmly, and hoped his voice didn't shake.

If it angered Kronos, the titan didn't show it. "We'll see," he said instead, and it was a dark promise that left Lee in no doubt that he had every intention of pushing until Lee broke.

Lee hoped he could take more than the titan could push. He knew it wasn't likely , but he had to, because if he didn't… He couldn't help Kronos hurt his family and friends. He couldn't.

Thanks for reading!
Tsari