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!

The demigods had started to fight back.

For what had felt like forever, Silena and Michael's reports – especially Silena's – had more or less boiled down to "camp life is going on as normal", which had relieved Lee and pleased Kronos. Lee still disagreed with Silena's blind belief that if the demigods just stayed out of the war, they wouldn't get hurt, but he wouldn't disagree that the less of a target they painted on their own backs, the safer they would be.

Living out camp life as per usual, training and playing Capture the Flag – albeit with vastly reduced numbers during the winter, as Lee recalled well – meant that Kronos seemed to be content to leave them alone, and anything that had Kronos leaving Lee's family and friends alone was a positive in his book.

Lee himself was not doing too well, admittedly. He had lost a lot of weight, muscles atrophying from inaction – the brief spells of freedom to go to the bathroom did a little but nowhere near enough - and being chained up the rest of the time meant he couldn't even do any exercises to keep in shape. His diet was enough to keep him from starvation and keep his brain sharp, because Kronos clearly wanted Lee's mental faculties intact, but it wasn't ideal, either.

Worst of all was the fact that he hadn't seen the sun since being captured. He had never worked out exactly where in the world Kronos was keeping him, but it was far enough underground that the sun never came close, not even a distant warmth just reaching him through the corridors. What he had worked out was that Kronos had more than one base, and a way to move between them both quickly and also undetected by the gods.

The biggest clue for that was the Princess Andromeda, a boat he'd heard mention of back when he was still at camp, and also heard mentioned in passing as Kronos barked out orders. From what Lee could tell, that was where a lot of the monsters were kept – which was a relief. The other demigods ranged from neutral to cruel but they had enough fear of Kronos to not hurt Lee, except with sharp words and venomous tongues. Years of instincts told Lee that if a monster came across him, his much-reduced healing abilities would be tested, and he wasn't certain that was something he could survive.

Although there were times when he'd wondered if it would be better if one of them did stumble across him and put him out of his misery. Kronos wouldn't be able to use him anymore, then.

Lee wasn't stupid. He hadn't caved and told Kronos what he wanted to know, not once, but clearly Kronos still thought it was worth having him listen in to all his spy reports. He hadn't physically reacted to lies in years, but with so many forced overloads, Lee was aware that he had almost certainly developed a nervous tic – not that he'd worked out what it was.

Thankfully, for the most part, Kronos' various spies told the truth. That made sense – they'd be poor spies if they didn't give accurate information – but Kronos clearly had enough paranoia over the possibility of double-agents that he had resorted to using a lie detector anyway, unluckily for Lee.

Michael was probably the least truthful, but they were all small things, a lack of certainty when he claimed it, and other similarly unremarkable things. Silena, on the other end of the scale, was meticulous in her truth-telling, almost honest to a fault.

As far as Lee knew, Silena was also the only spy, including Kronos' lesser used ones, the ones that kept an eye on the gods and some demigods who weren't at camp over the winter, who knew about him. When Kronos took a report from Michael and the others, he settled himself on the ever-present outcrop of rock which he posed on like a king. A tyrant, if Lee was being specific. It was only when the face materialising in muted colours was Silena's that Kronos moved, instead lounging next to Lee, looking so much more like Luke, so that Hecate's spell picked him up on the visual transmission, too.

Lee hated it. He hated the way Kronos still moved and posed like Luke, not always but enough, and always when he was after reactions, or the sadistic pleasure of watching his victim force themselves to suppress their reactions, because they knew it wasn't Luke, despite appearances. He hated how Kronos posed next to him, like he and Luke were chilling against the side of a building somewhere, rather than Lee being chained to a wall and Kronos inhabiting his once-friend's body.

Silena didn't outwardly react, but Lee knew her well enough to know that the sight hurt her, anyway. There were things he didn't know about the daughter of Aphrodite, now, because she'd lied to him for so long, but one trait that kept shining through, even in her spying, was how much she cared for people. To call it a shame that she'd channelled that care into some twisted belief that if she worked with Kronos she could protect people would be a massive understatement, but Lee hadn't particularly inherited his father's talent with words.

Music and healing weren't doing him any good, not now that his healing spluttered and died at anything greater than bruises, and truth… Well. Truth was what had put him in this situation in the first place. Lee didn't hate it, because it was from his father and he could never hate anything Apollo gave him, but part of him didn't think too kindly about that particular ability of his.

Then again, it had always been awkward, knowing when someone was lying. He'd alienated many classmates as a kid, before he lived at camp, by not knowing when it wasn't worth calling out a lie. It was also why he didn't advertise it at camp – he didn't need everyone looking at him, on edge every time they told a white lie. He'd alienated a few campers, too, before he'd learned when to keep his mouth shut and ignore a lie.

Lee did at least appreciate that Silena went out of her way not to tell a lie – more or less the only thing he still felt positively towards the daughter of Aphrodite for.

Unfortunately, that made it all the more obvious to Lee when suddenly, Silena did lie.

"I don't know," she said, pulling all the perfect expressions to mimic her own face when she spoke truths. "The head counsellors have narrowed it down to two opportunities, but they haven't decided which one to take, yet."

They were talking about cutting off some of Kronos' reinforcements, and Lee dearly wanted to get back in contact with camp himself to tell them that it didn't matter, the titan just called more up from Tartarus to replace his depleted ranks. They would be much, much, better off keeping their heads out of the way and not going out of their way to target Kronos.

Before Lee had been snatched, camp had always been reactive to Kronos. Lightning bolt stolen? Send a trio to retrieve it. Camp defences failing because the tree they were currently tied to was dying? Send Clarisse out to fetch the Golden Fleece. An invasion of camp? Fight back. Now, it seemed like the head counsellors were getting more and more proactive.

Lee wished he could say he didn't expect that of Michael, but Michael had always been trigger happy and quick to lash out, impersonating the old adage of how offence was the best defence. It was one thing that Lee had never fully managed to stop him doing, and it didn't surprise him that his younger brother had fallen into the safety of familiarity.

He wasn't even surprised that Clarisse was reportedly touting similar sentiments. She and Michael had always been more similar than either of them would admit even on pain of death, after all. The two of them working together would've been something to celebrate, in other circumstances. As it was, Lee wished they weren't enabling and egging each other on. Sooner or later, they'd come up with something that had Kronos furious enough to retaliate.

With Silena suddenly lying, he got the sinking feeling that she, at least, thought it was going to be sooner rather than later.

He also realised she was relying on him to not broadcast her lie to Kronos, even though she didn't look at him once. She rarely did, any more. Lee didn't know if it was because he looked so awful she couldn't bear to look – his hair was longer now than it had ever been, and he was sure his skin looked bleached and sallow, even in Hecate's visual transmissions – or if it was guilt, the acceptance that she had thrown away their friendship for good and that Lee could only forgive so much.

Lee didn't do it for Silena, but he did it for the demigods risking their lives to whittle down at Kronos' army, even if it was a futile endeavour.

The grilling he got once her report was over was the most intense it had been in a while, leaving Lee in no doubt that Kronos had noticed something, but Lee hadn't given in yet and he certainly wasn't going to cave with demigod lives potentially on the line.

Even when Kronos pushed and pushed and pushed, and the by-now familiar torment of multiple lies being thrown at him by a crowd of uncomfortably eager demigods lasted so long that Lee was sure he'd blacked out before they were done. Even if he hadn't passed out, he'd certainly lost awareness.

Coming back to his senses, face tight with dried tears and aching cheeks, and wrists screaming from where they'd still never lost the habit of fighting for freedom when his senses overloaded, to see Kronos still waiting, golden eyes burning and arms crossed in a way that was for once less Luke and more terrifying titan, was different. So was the way Kronos resumed the interrogation immediately, pushing and prying and pulling to get the details of Silena's lie out of him.

Lee had no idea how he held on. The continued lack of physical violence likely helped – if Kronos had snapped and decided physical torture would be more effective, then Lee wasn't sure if he could have done – but eventually Kronos stalked out of the room, glowering and presence oppressive even as he walked away with a single, terrifying, parting shot.

"You only have yourself to blame."

To blame for what?

The next time he saw Kronos, several meals so likely at least a week later, the titan was no happier, and Camp Half-Blood's target had been hit.

Lee actually heard the account from Ethan, who had scoffed about it as he watched Lee eat his food tentatively after his attempted healing session ended almost before it began. His wrists were weak, and permanently ringed with red welts and various shades of bruising, and hairline fractures in the bones weren't sealing up. Still, he had long since stopped taking for granted the freedom to eat at his own pace, feeding himself instead of being at the mercy of someone else.

Ethan hadn't been impressed at what the campers had done. In another circumstance, Lee would have found it hilarious, but all it really inspired was dread, instead. A contingency of monsters had been travelling via coach, heading for the Princess Andromeda to meet with Kronos and receive their orders. None of them appeared to have been particularly bright, but the implication was that Kronos thought them at least capable of following orders.

Someone had snuck into the coach's toilet and rigged the flush to set off a series of Greek Fire bombs, annihilating the coach and turning all of the monsters to dust. The part of Lee that had been a camp counsellor for many years saw the unholy combination of cabin eleven and cabin nine in the carnage – cabin nine to set up the mechanics behind the trap, and cabin eleven to sneak it into position.

Specifically, Lee would have pointed fingers in the direction of the Stolls and Beckendorf, if he was still at camp. It was the exact sort of uncontrolled chaos that the trio could get up to, even if Beckendorf at least pretended to be above Hermes cabin levels of shenanigans.

Lee had known the son of Hephaestus far too long to be fooled by that act.

Above all, though, the biggest hint to Beckendorf's involvement was Silena's lie. She hadn't lied about any of the other planned attacks, which had left Kronos in a position to counter them, even if his idea of counter so far seemed to be throwing more monsters at the problem – and with Clarisse and the Ares cabin so frequently leading the charge, that wasn't doing a whole lot. Beckendorf, however, she had always been close to. Her crush on the other boy had been blatantly obvious to everyone, with the possible exception of the boy in question, and the same was true of the reverse.

Even now, Lee could see Silena risking everything to try and protect him.

Ethan's recounting of the events from what he knew bordered on entertaining – certainly satisfying, from the point of view of someone who was no more eager for Kronos to win the war than he had been before he'd been captured – but when Kronos swept into the room later, after Ethan had re-shackled Lee and left, there was no entertainment at all.

There was fear, which slowly evolved into horror.

"You've been very stubborn, Lee," Kronos acknowledged. Normally when he spoke like that, he leaned into the way he was inhabiting Luke's body, but the body language stayed all wrong, more accurate to the titan inside. It didn't bode well. "I do admire your loyalty to the gods. Perhaps if more demigods had your devotion, I wouldn't even be here, but fortunately for me, you are an oddity, and not the normal." His tone lightened for a moment, before snapping into something dark and sharp. "However."

Golden eyes burned and Lee wanted to be anywhere that wasn't on the receiving end of a titan's intensity.

"This little rebellion of yours ends now, Lee," Kronos told him, a truth, something that he believed with his entire being. He'd said several things to that effect before, and Lee hadn't stopped yet. "I have entertained your pitiful attempts at stonewalling me for the past year" – gods, it had been a year? – "but my patience is now at an end. You will co-operate with me from now on."

Lee got the sense that something very bad was about to happen. Kronos was too certain, too angry, for it to be more of the same, and that meant the odds of it actually being something that could break him were much, much higher than he liked.

Kronos snapped his fingers, an action that sometimes accompanied part of Lee's body – often his mouth – freezing in place, but nothing happened to Lee.

There were footsteps instead, heavy and loud and uneven, like someone didn't want to be walking.

Alabaster walked in, his face unbearably smug, but it wasn't the son of Hecate that had Lee's insides slumping all the way down to the cave floor in despair.

No, that was the demigod in his grasp, cuffed and writhing in a desperate yet so clearly futile attempt to escape.

Gods, please, no.

And it's Stereden that you can blame for the ending :P

Thanks for reading!
Tsari