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!
Lee was asleep, as best he could sleep any more, light and fitful and uncomfortable enough that he only managed to doze at all because he was so exhausted his body just couldn't keep going any longer, when Kronos walked in. Footsteps on the cold, hard stone jerked him awake, and he groggily squinted at the approaching figure, blinking a few times to try and get his vision into focus.
"A child of Apollo, asleep in the middle of the day," Kronos commented, voice light and airy. "I'm given to believe that's very unusual."
Lee forced his head to raise, still heavy with exhaustion. It was the first time anyone had given him any indication of the time of day since he'd arrived, and despite himself he grasped for it desperately with mental hands. The middle of the day, when Apollo was high in the sky and Lee always felt the most awake.
Until now, apparently.
A glint of silver caught the flickering of the torchlight, as Kronos dangled one of his silver bracelets in front of him. "I can be generous, Lee," he said. "Silena didn't have the time to report to me and catch up with you, last week." – Hades, had that been a week ago? Time had been a whirlwind of more questions, more tests and avalanches of lies, food and bathroom breaks since then, but Lee hadn't thought it had been that long.
Not that he had any way of tracking time, anyway.
"She has some extra time now, though," the titan continued. He tilted his palm and the jewellery fell to the ground, landing with a discordant chink on the stone. "For your good behaviour."
As if on cue, the faded, washed-out version of an IM blossomed into existence in front of him, showing Silena.
"I'll leave you two alone." Lee's head jerked up in surprise as Kronos spun on his heel and walked out of the room, although the footsteps stopped long before they should have ended up out of earshot. Close enough to hear everything they said.
Reluctantly, he slumped back, raising his head to rest it against the stone behind him and dragging his eyes over to Silena. She looked uncomfortable, even though Lee imagined she was probably in the pegasus stables, or maybe in the woods somewhere. Somewhere much, much more comfortable than his cavern with its biting metal cuffs.
Why almost fell from his lips again, a desperate need to understand, but somewhere, not as buried as it felt like it ought to be, was a fragment of concern. Maybe it was because Silena looked so much more open this time, on the verge of tears herself.
"He's still in earshot," he said instead, warned her, maybe in some vague hope that she'd been able to tell him that she was actually a double agent, feeding Kronos cherry-picked information from camp whilst trying to glean his next moves in return. Her eyes widened, but Lee couldn't tell if it was surprise that Lee had warned her, or surprise that Kronos would eavesdrop.
Logically, it was probably the former.
She sighed. "Lee." There was a plea in the way she said his name, but Lee didn't know what for.
"Why?" he asked her, letting the instinctive question out. "Why, Silena?"
"Because things have to change," she said. "The gods create us then forget about us, unless it's to use us as their tools, and I can't forgive them for that."
Lee thought of Apollo, of dreams of music and poetry and the underlying feeling of love. Of being stuck in a social worker's office while his future was debated, only for an older man with a limp and an awesome cane to walk in and say he was there on behalf of Lee's father, that he'd be taking Lee to his new home.
"No," he said, softly but without hesitation. "They don-"
"Your father is an exception, Lee," Silena cut him off. "You know this. You know cabin seven is the happiest cabin, the only one whose parent bothers to remember they exist. We all see it." She sounded sad, and Lee realised he'd never really heard her talk about her mother, outside of the myths.
"You think Kronos is better?" he demanded. "You'd rather this war was won by a titan famous for eating his children?"
"We're not his children," Silena pointed out, correcting him with that slant to her lips that she usually used on younger siblings that didn't quite understand camp dynamics, and Lee remembered that Aphrodite had come from Ouranos, that Silena was closer to Kronos' niece, one of the few campers that wasn't technically descended from him, not that Lee liked to focus on that aspect of the family tree very much.
"I don't understand," Lee admitted.
She gave him a sad smile. "I know," she said. "Cabin seven is the only cabin without any defectors, Lee. You all have too much faith in your father to turn on him. I envy you that, you know. That you have at least one parent that you believe in, even if I don't understand how you do it. What does Apollo do to buy your undying loyalty?"
There was too much there to put into words, things that they didn't tell other cabins, not wanting to rub in how well they had it. Things they suspected Apollo wasn't supposed to be doing, with how secretly he always interacted with them.
"He remembers we exist," Lee eventually replied, knowing that Silena would have read something into his silence but not willing to give her secrets. Definitely not willing to give her secrets, now.
Once, he'd trusted Silena and Luke with his life, with his friendship and emotions and things that, as he got older, he found it harder to put onto younger campers. Luke had broken all that, and Silena had drifted away from Lee in the wake of his betrayal, too wounded herself, but Lee had still thought he could count on her when it counted.
He knew better, now.
Luke was gone, his body left behind as Kronos' meat puppet, and Silena… After the revelation that she was on Kronos' side, too, Lee couldn't trust her as far as he could throw her – and with the cuffs pinning his wrists to the wall, he couldn't throw anything at all.
"And you're happy with just that?" Silena asked. "Lee, we need more than just basic acknowledgement that we exist."
That, Lee refused to respond to. Apollo did far more than the basic acknowledgement, but Silena had lost all right to private conversations, now.
"Why are you doing this?" he asked her, instead. "If you believe Kronos is the better option, why are you still in camp? How can you possibly stay and keep lying to everyone's faces? Why didn't you just leave like everyone else did?"
"Because someone had to stay," Silena said. "Someone has to make sure the campers stay out of it."
Lee thought of falling barriers, constant monster attacks, and finally an invading army, and shook his head. "You're not succeeding," he said.
She looked down, fingers twisting together. Her fingernails were painted what looked like a shade of blue, but it was difficult to tell with the muted colours of the apparition.
"I'll keep them as safe as I can," she said. "They don't have to get hurt, if they'd just stay out of the way… Neither of us wanted anyone to get hurt."
Lee carefully didn't ask who us was. He was pretty sure he knew, anyway.
There was another question he didn't want to ask, but also needed to, because he had to know how, even if Kronos was eavesdropping. Luke and Silena had betrayed him for years and he hadn't had a clue, until it was too late and he was picking up the shards of a broken heart.
"You're delusional," he said, "if you think the camp won't fight this war." Any chance they had of staying out of it had disappeared the moment monsters spilled out of the Labyrinth and into their home. Kronos, Luke, whoever had made that call, had made sure of that. Gods, but Lee hoped that had been Kronos, after he took Luke's body.
If Luke had been the one to call the attack on camp, on what had been his home, full of demigods he had always promised Lee he'd protect with all the sincerity of an oath, then Lee didn't know what he'd do.
"No-one's even mentioned it since the start of summer," Silena countered. Since the Labyrinth attack, Lee translated. Since five deaths, in the place that was supposed to be safe. "They're safest like this, Lee. Keeping their heads down, not provoking Kronos. They'll survive as long as they stay like that."
Lee highly doubted that the campers would stay meek. Percy didn't have a choice, and Annabeth was a devout supporter of the son of Poseidon. Clarisse and Michael didn't know the meaning of the word meek, and if they put aside their rivalry long enough to work together, they'd be formidable.
He remembered the scorpion-hunting game, and the way everyone had complained at the unfairness of him being partnered with Clarisse because they knew there weren't many pairings more efficient than the two of them, in combat. If they could stop arguing long enough to work together, Clarisse and Michael would be a serious force to be reckoned with, even more so than Lee and Clarisse had been.
"What about me?" he asked her, and his voice broke on the last word, the deep-seated betrayal too much to pass unacknowledged, even if Lee tried hard to push it down. Guilt flashed across Silena's face for a split second before she got her expression back under control. "This isn't my idea of safe, Silena." He tugged his wrists again, trying in vain to find a weak point to exploit. As a bonus, the chains around his legs twitched hard enough to provoke the metal into clinking.
Silena's face paled, but she set her shoulders. "It didn't have to be like this," she said softly. "You could have joined, Lee. You should join." Her voice slipped briefly into desperation, and Lee didn't miss the present tense.
He shook his head. "I can't, Silena. I won't. I'm not a traitor."
She gave a full body flinch at the word. "Lee, please," she said. "Join us. We can protect everyone we care about, keep them out of the war-"
"I care about my dad," Lee interrupted her. "Joining won't protect anyone, least of all him."
"You're going to get torn to pieces if you keep fighting," Silena told him, and her voice shook. It almost looked like she was starting to cry.
Lee wanted to cry, except he didn't when he actually felt the tell-tale build up in his own eyes.
"Please, Lee. Don't do this to yourself."
"You did this to me," Lee told her, his voice quavering and breaking under the strain. "You, and Luke, and everyone else that decided to fight the gods. I'm here, like this, because of you."
And it hurt. It hurt when Kronos walked in, mimicking Luke's body language so perfectly that it had to be muscle memory, before golden eyes glared at him and the wrong voice came out of his mouth. It hurt when Alana, Ethan, and the other demigods Lee remembered from camp looked at him with uncaring eyes, neutral at best and with disgust at worse. It hurt, to see Silena still in camp, tearing it apart from inside and claiming she was doing it to keep demigods safe when all she was causing was pain.
Silena didn't seem to have a response for that, tears overflowing down her cheeks, as she put a perfectly manicured hand in front of her mouth to stifle her sobs. Lee felt tears cascade down his own face, too, because apparently he still had more left to fall.
"Just…" he said, his voice unsteady and wobbling. "Tell me one thing." He took a breath that morphed into a sob halfway through. "How… how did you and Luke get all of this past me?"
It was a dangerous question to ask, with Kronos eavesdropping just outside the door, but Lee had to know. Luke and Silena had both known about his ability for a long time – it had been more of an open camp secret, still, when Silena had first joined, and he'd trusted Luke with the knowledge himself in what was clearly now one of his biggest mistakes. He couldn't believe they'd been deceiving him the entire time, but at some point they'd clearly managed it.
Silena wiped away her tears with the back of her wrist, gently blotting it so it wouldn't ruin her makeup. Lee had seen her do the same thing so many times before; Silena had always been an easy crier, and had preserving her eye make-up down to an art.
"We told you the truth," she said. "I love camp, I love the people in camp. I want everyone in here to be safe, and happy."
They were things she'd said to him before, things she'd said over and over, for years, because it was hard to be a year-round camper and not fall in love with it all. They had always been true.
They were still true.
"Luke wanted the same thing," she said. "He wanted us to be acknowledged by our parents. He wanted us to grow up as something more than the gods' discarded tools, picked up when it suited them and neglected the rest of the time." She met his eyes evenly through the murky colours. "We only ever told you the truth, Lee."
The knowledge settled over him like a thick, constricting blanket, the only freedom a single breath of fresh air as Lee understood.
He didn't like it. He hated it. It meant that all he was good for was just spotting petty white lies and nothing drastic enough to be dangerous, but he understood what had happened.
Truth was personal. He'd told Michael that, once, the only time Michael had indulged in enough curiosity to ask him about his ability. If someone believed what they were saying, it was a truth to them.
Luke, Silena, and no doubt so many others, believed in what they were doing. They believed it would, eventually, bring the best result for the demigods, and because they believed that, Lee believed them when they said it.
"It got harder, once Luke left," Silena confessed, and a fresh wave of tears formed in her eyes. "When people started asking different questions, how anyone could do what he did, whether anyone else felt that way… Questions I couldn't answer without lying to them."
Silena had pulled away from Lee, after Luke's betrayal. He'd noticed it at the time, but deep in his own grief, had assumed it was her way of dealing with the same.
He swallowed.
"You started avoiding me," he said. "So I wouldn't notice."
Her nod was a devastating confirmation. "I'm sorry, Lee," she said, and she meant it but Lee couldn't accept it, not then. Not when it was raw and he had chafed wrists and bruised ankles.
Not when Silena had admitted she and Luke had been working together since before Luke betrayed them and left. Before Percy was poisoned and almost killed.
Where did Percy fall in Silena's determination to save campers? Kronos needed him dead, and Luke had almost done it. Was he written off as a necessary sacrifice?
Lee was clearly an exception, too. Maybe they didn't want him dead – he was fed enough to keep surviving, even though he was certain it wasn't three meals a day, his room was as clean as a cavern could expect to be and he was shoved into the bathroom periodically, aside from that one cut on his palm and the injuries from the restraints they had hardly physically injured him – but this wasn't safe. Either the gods would win and Lee would be freed – if anyone found him – or the titans would win, and would Kronos really keep him around after that?
He let himself slump back against the wall, head hanging again. There was no point seeming resilient to Silena. He would never convince her with words that she was wrong, that what she was doing wasn't protecting anyone, just spouting pretty words that for now she still believed. But he could show her the hypocrisy of her claims, how he wasn't safe or well.
His hair flopped down in front of his eyes. It was getting longer than he usually let it get, but he was resigned to no haircut any time soon; Kronos had been careful not to give him anything that he could use as a weapon, and Lee refused to trust anyone in Kronos' army with a sharp object near him.
"I really am sorry, Lee," Silena said again. Lee refused to look up at her any more, feeling more yet more tears fall. "I didn't want this to happen to you. Please, at least think about cooperating?"
Lee swallowed. "I'm not a traitor," he said. "Not like you."
Silena sniffled. "You always were the reliable one," she admitted. "Just remember to look out for yourself, too, Lee."
There was no response to give to that that he wanted to say, so he said nothing, keeping his head down even when Kronos' footsteps came back in, and the tinkle of silver said that the call was over and that the titan had scooped up his bracelet.
Silena didn't understand. She wasn't protecting anyone, with what she was doing. All she was doing was hurting everyone.
Lee refused to join her.
Thanks for reading!
Tsari