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!

It repeated.

Lee lost track of how many times Kronos came in, a group of demigods in tow, and tried to force him into playing his twisted version of two truths and a lie, ending with the finale of a cacophony of lies so intense that he was left a trembling, sobbing wreck. It was usually the same demigods – some faces came and went, but Reuben, Aquila and Claudia were staples, and Lee suspected that they would continue to be first in line for anything that involved tormenting him for as long as Kronos allowed.

Given that Lee had, somehow, yet to break and answer Kronos – not that he knew how he was still holding out, when he was reaching the point that he was having to fight off panic the moment a group descended on him – he was pretty certain the titan would keep letting them.

They were the worst for feeding him; Lee dreaded seeing any of the trio walk in with food, because they all but forced him to eat it. If it was Kronos, he tended to release Lee's wrists and let him feed himself in peace, which had the added benefit of being able to cradle his aching, constantly in pain, wrists and murmur a hymn to relieve their suffering even a little.

It was a dichotomy of kindness against the torture he orchestrated the rest of the time.

If there was a regular schedule to any of the visits – food, torture, being shoved into a little bathroom adjoining the room to use the toilet and sometimes clean up some of the ever-building cave grime, too – then Lee couldn't track it. He hadn't seen the sun since the battle, couldn't even feel the faintest hint of his father's warmth, and that left him utterly disorientated when it came to time. He was under no illusions that Kronos wasn't doing it on purpose – the titan of time would have intimate knowledge in how to ruin timekeeping, if he wasn't just simply manipulating time to further disorient Lee.

When he wasn't being tortured, either by Kronos or by the overzealous hatred Marcus' friends threw at him, though, Lee somehow found himself being bored. He couldn't do anything, spending almost all his time firmly secured to the cave wall, and it felt like he was left to stew in his own company with no distractions for hours on end. It felt ridiculous, to be suffering from boredom in his situation.

Could he even call it suffering when it was the alternative to personal attention from a titan determined to break him, and getting closer and closer with every session, if Lee was honest? He didn't know how he'd held on so long already; he had no idea how he was going to keep holding on, just the knowledge that he had to, no matter how impossible a task it was starting to feel like.

He hadn't known it was possible to be simultaneously bored and scared.

The door stayed open the whole time. Lee had seen it shift once, when a demigod had leaned against it, so he knew it could close, but Kronos had never bothered to shut him in. Given that Lee was still no closer to finding his way out of the manacles than he had been when he'd first woken up, it was obvious why.

He still couldn't see much of the corridor, though, and the foot traffic passing his room – he wanted to call it a cell but did it really count as one when the door never shut? – had increased, so it was difficult to tell when someone was coming in to see him rather than just walking past to whatever it was they did when they weren't tormenting him.

Movement out of the corner of his eyes drew his attention to his newest visitor, striding in through the open doorway. The torches hadn't been changed in a while and were starting to burn low, enough to cast their face in shadow until they got close enough.

It was an Asian looking guy, similar in age to Lee at a guess, with an eyepatch covering his left eye. His face was familiar, although Lee didn't remember the eye patch and couldn't place him.

"Hello, Lee," he said. He wasn't carrying any food, and while so far the physical torture had been mostly incidental – Lee's wrists were taking the brunt of that – Lee was also relieved to note that the sword stayed in its sheath as the demigod sat cross-legged on the floor in front of him.

He was also confused, because normally demigods only came in without Kronos if it was feeding time.

"Remember me?" the other demigod continued. "I was at camp, for a few summers."

That explained the familiarity, and Lee wracked his brain. It had to have been someone that had left a few years ago – the eyepatch was definitely a new addition, but he was pretty sure he'd recognise them regardless if it had been recent. He studied the rest of his face, taking in the clear Asian heritage and racing through all the Asian kids at camp that had not come back one year.

"Ethan?" he asked, hesitantly, and the boy's face twisted into some sort of a smile, although it wasn't a happy one.

"That's me," he confirmed. "The eyepatch throw you off?"

"It didn't help," Lee admitted, trying to remember what else he knew about Ethan. He'd left camp before the war had even started, before Luke's betrayal, even, another case of an unclaimed kid deciding they'd had enough of being unwanted even in the camp that was supposed to be a home to them and leaving. Lee had always understood it, if only theoretically. He'd not got far enough into the foster system to ever feel that way personally.

He could also begrudgingly understand why an unclaimed, resentful kid would join Kronos. Chris had been another one, perhaps worse because everyone had known he was a Hermes kid – he had the same looks, the same skills – and he'd lived in his parent's cabin and still was never claimed. The final straw for him had clearly been when he'd been passed over for head counsellor in favour of the younger, less experienced Stolls purely because they'd been claimed and he hadn't been. Lee didn't think he would've been able to say no to helping the other boy even if he hadn't understood that, but it had certainly helped him throw himself whole-heartedly into trying to help Clarisse restore his sanity.

He'd always been able to see why someone that hadn't been helped by a system would be drawn to the possibility of change. That made sense, a case of grass looking greener on the other side even though Lee fully believed that Kronos would be no better for them than the current system. It was the others he didn't understand at all, Luke, Alana and the others who had been claimed and raised as a child of their particular godly parent. How could they turn their backs and think joining Kronos was better?

"Was it treated properly?" he asked Ethan, eyes fixed on the patch. Eye trauma was nasty, he'd seen it before, in nasty camp accidents.

Ethan shrugged. "Nothing left to treat," he said dismissively. "My mother took it."

"Your mother?" Lee asked, and his voice came out a little strangled. He didn't remember Ethan's mortal parental situation – it had to have been good enough for him to only live at camp during the summer – but the way he said it, like his eye had just vanished, sounded a lot like…

"Yeah," Ethan said, a little bitterly. "She claimed me in the end. Told me I would rebalance the world, and took my eye in exchange. An eye for an eye and all that."

"Nemesis?" Lee asked hoarsely. It sounded like the sort of thing the goddess of vengeance would do or say – but to her own child?

Maybe he understood why Ethan was still on Kronos' side.

"Nemesis," Ethan confirmed. "I don't understand you, Lee."

Lee blinked, confused at the sudden declaration. "What don't you understand?" he asked.

The son of Nemesis gestured at their surroundings. "This," he said. "You could be comfortable. You have something Kronos wants. All you need to do is give it to him and you'd be out of here and at his right hand. It's a position many of us would kill for, but you're refusing at every turn. Are you that loyal to the gods? Why?"

"Why shouldn't I be?" Lee asked. "I don't understand how Kronos winning would be better than what we have at the moment."

The laugh that Ethan let out was dark and humourless. "Of course you don't," he said. "Perfect child of Apollo, claimed the moment you enter camp and lavished with praise and love from everyone. Why wouldn't you want to keep things that way?" His remaining eye sent a look st Lee that went right through him, serious and even a little pitying, underneath the dismissiveness. "You're living a pretty little lie, Lee. At least my mother was upfront about it."

"Upfront about what?" Lee asked, confused. The resentment for Apollo kids also made some sort of sense – Lee knew they had the best relationship with their godly parent barring only, possibly, Dionysus' kids, whose father actually lived in camp with them – but the thing about living a lie? That didn't. Lee had been a camper for ten years, he could sense lies and he'd never sensed he was living a lie.

"The cost of being a demigod," Ethan told him bluntly. He gestured at his eye. "There's always a price to pay, Lee. Look at yourself. Apollo gave you a power – one that's powerful, too, no wonder you always hid it – but what's that done for you? Chained up in a cave, regularly driven over the brink of panic because it's so easily turned against you." He scoffed. "Apollo hurts his children, punishes them for the things he gave them, but over and over again, you all fall for it until it's too late."

"Apollo doesn't," Lee snapped.

"Doesn't he?" Ethan challenged. "Did Luke ever tell you about Hal?"

The name was wholly unfamiliar. "Who's Hal?" he asked, cautiously.

Ethan shifted in place, looking for all the world like he was sitting back around the campfire at camp, ready to tell a story. The faint flickering of the torchlight played with the shadows on his face, making them eat up the black eyepatch whole. "Evidence of Apollo's cruelty to his own children," he said. "Luke met him, once. He's told the story several times since this war began, because camp has always held your father up as the pinnacle of parental godhood. We all know you Apollo kids think you have it good, that he's a reason why the gods should be allowed to continue with their pathetic attempts at using and abusing mortals under the guise of parenting. He's not."

A story. Luke had come up with some sort of story to demonise Apollo. It shouldn't have felt like a betrayal – in the grand scheme of all the things his former friend had done, it logically ranked low – but somehow it did.

"Hal was a son of Apollo that could see the future," Ethan continued. "But he wasn't allowed to act on it, no matter what he saw. He saved a girl's life, because what monster asks someone to stand aside and do nothing when someone is going to die? Apollo cursed him for it, for using the same power that he had given him in the first place. Hal lost his voice, was imprisoned in a house surrounded by monsters that killed anyone that came near and spoke his own thoughts out loud to him, and was left there to suffer until he died. Luke and Thalia tried to save him and almost got killed in the process – and they failed, too. Hal still died, thanks to the curse his own father put on him."

His eye glittered in the torchlight.

"I know you know I'm telling the truth," he said, and he was right – there hadn't been a single hint of a lie. "If he did that to one son with a powerful ability he gave, what will he do to you, Lee?"

Ethan wasn't lying, but it didn't work like that. Ethan believed what Luke told him, but that didn't mean Luke hadn't lied to Ethan. It was a lie wrapped up like a truth, the way retold stories could be, but Lee hadn't let on that part of how his ability worked to Luke, so Kronos didn't know, which meant Ethan and the other demigods didn't know, either.

They just knew that if they said something true, Lee would know, and didn't realise how personal truth could be.

Lee wasn't about to give that clarifier away, though, even if it meant letting Ethan continue operating under such an awful view of his own father. Apollo would never do that to them. Lee had never even met an Apollo kid that had inherited any serious degree of prophecy, or even much beyond occasional dreams – and they all knew that the dreams came from Apollo, anyway.

"I'm not a prophet," he said, instead. "Or an oracle."

Ethan shot him a look that was part disgusted, part cloying pity.

"You're blind, is what you are," he replied. "I might be down an eye but you're the one that can't see." He shook his head. "Are you really going to keep torturing yourself for the gods? They don't care, Lee. Apollo doesn't even need to step in with you, you're doing his job for him, sitting down here and not taking all the chances you're being given to save yourself. You could be free of all of this, Lee."

"I'd be free if you got me out of these chains," Lee muttered, before looking Ethan in the eye. "I'm not giving in," he told him. "Kronos can keep trying and maybe he will break me, eventually, but I'm not giving in. I won't give in. I can't."

"Why?" Ethan pushed, and he sounded almost a little despairing. He hadn't been a cruel boy, Lee remembered. Quiet and a little sullen, fed up of being ignored by his godly parent, but not cruel. He was trying to help Lee; Lee wasn't blind enough to miss it, but the help he was offering wasn't help at all. Not for Lee. "Why are you putting yourself through this, Lee? The gods aren't worth it, and I can't believe you don't know that, somewhere inside. You've seen me, the other unclaimed kids at camp. I never pegged you as someone cruel enough to think that what we're going through is good, even if you're too blind to see what your own father is doing. Why?"

That was the easiest question Lee had been asked since he'd arrived.

"Because I have people to protect," he said. "This isn't about me, Ethan. It was never about me."

"You can protect them better if you're at Kronos' side!" Ethan exclaimed. "How is this protecting them?"

"Because Kronos doesn't protect anyone," Lee said firmly. He could see Chris, babbling and insensate and flinching away from even the most gentle of healing touches. "What you see in Apollo, I see in Kronos, Ethan. I won't join him. Not willingly. Not ever."

Ethan sighed. "You're delusional, Lee," he said, but he pulled himself to his feet again. "He'll break you, you know. You should forget about other people and think about yourself. No-one would blame you for protecting yourself."

Lee gave him a small, tired, smile. "I would."

The torchlight had all but faded away, burning down to embers, and now that Ethan had stood up, his face was impossible to see. He left without another word, leaving Lee alone as the torches sputtered and died out.

Thanks for reading!
Tsari