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!

"I think it's time to change things up a little," Kronos said as he swept into the room, hands in his pockets and looking entirely too much like Luke in poise. He was alone, with neither food nor demigods, and Lee's instinctual tension at the arrival transitioned into a wary confusion instead.

He didn't think the change was going to be any better for him.

Kronos sat on the floor, cross-legged and once again acting more like Luke than Lee would have thought a titan would. He didn't know if it was muscle memory, or if Kronos was doing it on purpose, using his old friend's face and body as another tool in his arsenal of torture.

"It's getting a little boring, the same old routine, the same questions, isn't it, Lee?" he asked conversationally, like he wasn't talking about interrogating him into nerve-blasting overstimulation whenever he felt like it. To Lee's surprise, and rapidly rising trepidation, the titan leaned forwards and released his wrists again. Lee instinctively cradled them against his chest, trying not to look.

His sporadic healing whenever he was released was keeping them from getting too bad, but Lee's healing ability was limited, especially in a cavern so far from the sun, and no matter how much he helped the bruises heal, more kept piling on over the top of them. He was also pretty certain he had a cracked bone or two, at that point, and red welts were stubbornly rising.

He hadn't had a chance to properly look at his ankles; they weren't under as much constant pressure as his wrists, but they also hadn't been released once. What soothing he'd attempted to do had been near-blind.

Kronos watched the action, but didn't comment on them. Lee hoped he'd get a chance to give them another burst of healing before he was re-restrained – he hadn't done any healing in front of Kronos yet, and he didn't plan to, either.

"I thought we could discuss a different sort of question today," the titan said. "A change from playing truths and lies. What do you think?"

Lee thought that it was a rhetorical question and didn't bother to respond. Kronos was going to do whatever he wanted to, and there wasn't much he could do about it, except be uncooperative.

"Luke remembered you being more talkative than this," Kronos commented. "But I can understand why you're less willing to talk to me, with your misguided faith in your father and the other gods. That is, of course, a decision you have to make for yourself, although you understand that I can't let you roam through my base when you're not loyal to me."

"I'll never be loyal to you," Lee said firmly, and Kronos gave him a smile, one of Luke's understanding ones.

"You have made that quite clear, yes," he said. "Luckily, your loyalty is not important to me, so that doesn't change anything except your own level of freedom. But I digress. I have questions for you, Lee, and I expect answers from you. Truthful ones, if you can manage that," he added wryly. "It would make your life far more pleasant."

"Questions that don't require an audience?" Lee couldn't help but ask, glancing around. Outside of the room, footsteps passed up and down the corridor. Kronos followed his gaze and tsked.

"I had forgotten about that," he said, and lie prickled at Lee's spine as the titan pushed himself to his feet and walked back towards the doorway.

The door shut with a thud that sounded far louder than it should be, and then locked with a click that shot straight through Lee's head. Immediately his heartrate accelerated – the door was never shut, it didn't need to be shut, why had Kronos changed that now, what did that mean?

"No need for the peanut gallery for this little chat of ours," Kronos said, and his golden eyes glittered in the torchlight. The scar on Luke's face attracted the deepest shadows and the brightest highlights, an exaggerated line down his cheek. "Just us for this one, Lee," he chuckled. It wasn't a nice laugh, light on the top with dark undertones that promised that Lee was going to hate whatever was about to happen.

Kronos sat himself back down again, cross-legged but next to Lee's legs. If he wanted to, Lee could have reached out to touch him with his unrestrained wrists, or even kicked him with one of his feet. It was tempting, but it wouldn't do him any good. If it was that easy to take out the titan, someone would have done it long ago.

And if Kronos was in Lee's reach, then that meant Lee was in Kronos' reach, and that was far more terrifying. So far, the physical torture had been kept to happenstance consequences, like his wrists, or small outbursts by some of the more aggressive demigods, but the shut door preyed on Lee's mind nervously.

"Nothing difficult," the titan promised, leaning forwards, arms resting casually on his knees. "Just a few things I'd like to know." None of those were lies, but Lee still disagreed with the first phrase on principle. Maybe they weren't theoretically difficult questions, but Lee didn't think they were going to be questions he was willing to answer, either. "Tell me, can anyone else detect lies?"

"So you can try and make them your pet lie detector instead?" Lee asked defensively.

"Wouldn't you like some company here?" Kronos asked him, teeth too visible and glinting in the torchlight. "Surely you get lonely, stuck in this room by yourself for so long."

"I'd rather be lonely than hand you another victim," Lee snapped, faltering when Kronos raised an eyebrow.

"So there is someone else?"

What? Lee ran back through the conversation, trying to see where Kronos had reached that conclusion, and realised with a grimace that it did sound like he'd been saying yes. Damn it, he couldn't let Kronos believe that; there wasn't, not that Lee knew of, and he couldn't let Kronos start expecting that there was otherwise he might try to track one down. Lee didn't want to even think about what Kronos would do in that quest, especially when no-one else showed up.

"No," he said, stumbling over the word a bit in his haste to get it out. "No, no-one else. I'm the only one."

"Are you sure about that?" Kronos pressed, leaning closer. "Truthful answers only, Lee."

"Yes," Lee said, a little frantically and realising that Kronos had finally succeeded in getting him to give him an answer to one of his questions, but this wasn't something he could stay silent on. Not when it put his siblings at risk. "Yes, I'm the only one. It's rare."

"So there's no-one else in camp that could put my spy at risk of discovery?"

Lee hated the reminder that Kronos had someone inside the camp, no doubt reporting on their defences, and probably more specifically on everything Percy did, given the son of Poseidon's Big Three kid status and the fact that one way or another, he seemed to be dragged into everything even remotely related to the war.

"No," he admitted, because getting the spy pulled out would be ideal, but given the response to finding out about Lee had been to kidnap Lee, rather than pull any spies, he didn't think implying that the spy was at risk would do anything more than have the other campers – especially the Apollo and Hermes kids – put under more intense scrutiny.

Lee could only hope that instead he could lull the spy into enough of a sense of security that they got sloppy enough to be caught by the campers. Although the situation did beg the question of how long the spy had been spying for, and how Lee hadn't noticed. Kronos hadn't known until he'd somehow forced it out of Luke, but if Luke had privately warned the spy before then…

Then that meant the spy had been set by Luke, not by Kronos, and Lee didn't want to confront that possibility, either. Not if he could avoid it.

"See, not difficult questions," Kronos smirked, as though he hadn't had to cajole and manipulate Lee into answering it using his need to keep the campers as safe as possible from the titan. "The next one is even easier."

Lee doubted that was supposed to make him feel more at ease. Even if it was, it didn't.

"Do you know who my spy is?" Kronos leaned closer in, until he was almost in Lee's face. "And if you do, have you told anyone?"

That all but confirmed that the spy had already been active while Lee was still in camp, and the realisation choked him up. He hadn't noticed Luke, trying to raise – and eventually succeeding in raising – Kronos, and now there had been a spy also under his nose for at least some of the year, most likely all of it, because a spy that was only around during the summer wouldn't be as useful by half, and Lee hadn't noticed them, either.

What was the point of being able to detect lies if he only ever noticed the silly, harmless white lies and completely missed the people that actually meant his home harm?

"If I did?" he tried, pushing back to try and find some equilibrium again, although as soon as he said it he realised what the answer would be, what he'd once again accidentally implied.

"Then I suggest you tell me quickly, before I start arranging for accidents to befall anyone that seems at all suspicious," Kronos told him, too many teeth to be a smile.

Dammit, Lee shouldn't have implied anything, should have just answered the question straight away and left the self-rumination for later. "I didn't," he said. "I don't- I don't know who your spy is, I didn't know there was one. As far as I know no-one suspects one at all. I didn't." They'd all assumed that all the Kronos sympathisers had left, not stuck around to keep sabotaging them from the inside.

Even now, knowing that there was one, Lee still couldn't quite understand why. It was one thing to hate the gods. It was another to intentionally sabotage the people that had been friends, family.

"Not too difficult, was it?" Kronos asked him. "You don't have to make these harder than they need to be, Lee. These are only simple questions. You were the head counsellor of your cabin, yes? Who do you expect to be your successor?"

Lee swallowed back the instinctive question of why he wanted to know that. There was no good reason for Kronos to care about the head counsellorship of cabin seven.

"Ask your spy," he said. Kronos tutted.

"You misunderstand the question," he said, too close to Lee's personal space. "I didn't ask who has succeeded you. I asked who you expected to. It's all theoretical, of course you wouldn't know for certain. After all, you don't even know who's still alive."

Lee's heartrate jumped. Somehow it hadn't occurred to him that, outside of the murdered Marcus, people could have died in the attack. Clearly the attack hadn't wiped everyone out, otherwise there wouldn't be any talk of spies and Lee would probably have been killed rather than captured, himself, but there was a middle ground between the two extremes.

"It's a simple question, Lee," Kronos coaxed. "Who should succeed you? Had you started training someone up, just in case?"

Michael. Michael was theoretically next in line, but naming him meant putting a target on his back and Lee couldn't do that to his younger brother.

He couldn't do that to any of his siblings.

But then. The question was who he expected to step up. He knew it would be Michael, but Michael wasn't supposed to succeed him for another year and there were others older than him, who could, theoretically run the cabin until they left either this summer, or next summer.

Gods, Kronos was asking him to paint a target on the back of one of his siblings. It was not a simple question, and the titan knew that.

Kronos also wasn't giving him time to think, leaning closer and closer and hemming him in against the wall. "This isn't a hard question, Lee," he said, and his voice was getting sharp, the way it did when Lee kept refusing to call out the lies, when his patience was thinning and he switched to ordering a cacophony of lies and Lee's breathing hitched. "One name. Now."

It was a tone that promised retribution if he didn't answer, the golden eyes digging in to his soul.

Lee squeezed his eyes shut. "Lawrence," he lied, sending a massive mental apology to his older brother. Lawrence was off to dance school at the end of the summer, he'd be getting out of the war, soon, but he was one of the oldest cabin seven members and also one of the longest after Lee and Michael so it made sense that he'd step up, in an emergency like this one.

Maybe he even had.

Gods, Lee hoped he hadn't just killed his brother.

"Lawrence." Kronos rolled the name around in his mouth and Lee cringed. "I see."

"Why?" Lee demanded. Kronos grabbed his wrists and in a brief panic Lee realised he was getting chained up again, even though he hadn't had a chance to heal them at all. He tried to yank away, but Kronos' grip was as strong as the iron cuffs themselves and all Lee succeeded in doing was agitating a muscle as it strained in not quite the right direction.

The clicks sounded like finality. "Why?" he repeated, hearing the desperation in his voice. He tugged futilely at the restraints, his wrists complaining loudly at the action as though he needed the reminder that Kronos hadn't waited for him to heal himself first.

The titan stood back up, all of Luke's fluidity flowing through the action.

"Two truths and a lie," he said, not even looking at Lee as he walked over to the door. "That's what you told me."

Lee's stomach plummeted.

"I-"

"It was most enlightening," the titan continued. "As a reward for your good behaviour, I will leave Lawrence alone, as long as he doesn't do anything to incite me."

Relief warred with confusion, because mercy wasn't something Lee associated with the titan renowned for eating his own children. Gods, he hoped Lawrence kept on the way he expected his brother to, keeping his head down until he got to the dance school of his dreams.

Kronos pulled the door open and stepped out into the hallway. "Sleep well tonight, Lee," he said, as though Lee had any sense left of when it was day and when it was night. "Tomorrow, the routine will change."

With those ominous sounding words, he walked out of the room, leaving Lee to fill with dread again. What was that supposed to mean? What sort of change to the routine – there hadn't been a solid routine in the first place. Lee ate whenever they appeared with food, he was tortured whenever Kronos decided to interrogate him, and he slept in uneven fits and starts snatched whenever he was tired enough that he all but passed out.

This interrogation had already been a change to even that uneven order of things. What else did Kronos have in store for him, and was it related to what Lee had said and done this time? What had Kronos been after with the inane questions, especially that last one?

It didn't escape his notice that the door had been left open again.

Thanks for reading!
Tsari