Title: Guard
Fandom: Leverage & MCU
Rating: Teen
Length: 877 words
Content notes: referenced character death and violence, imprisonment
Summary: After the fiasco in Afghanistan, Tony Stark gets out of the weapons business. Damien Moreau takes offense.

Eliot learned to shoot on Howard Stark's guns. He took up hunting with one of the man's first models, while his dad stayed loyal to his old Browning. When the army knocked, they introduced him to an even newer Stark model, all sleek and dangerous and vicious in Eliot's hands. After the army, Moreau seduced him with many things, including a Stark gun that wasn't even on the markets, one of Tony Stark's instead of his father's. Eliot didn't join for the guns, but they didn't hurt. It made it strangely ironic that now, the same man who designed the gun Eliot wore was in a cell that Eliot had been directed to guard.

This part of Moreau's compound only held one cell. It was used for the most dangerous houseguests, and guarded all hours of the day.

As Eliot settled onto the bench for his first rotation, the prisoner asked, "Hey, got a smoke?"

"Yes," Eliot replied. He didn't move.

.

Three days later, he came on time for the rotation, but it looked as though the guard before him had left early. Moreau was going to break the man's neck, Eliot reminisced as he walked over to the nearest window. It was two doors outside the cell, both of which had the best security a paranoid, billionaire criminal could buy. He leaned out the window, settling onto his elbows. It really was a nice night out there.

"You going up or down?" Eliot asked, barely glancing down at Stark, who'd lowered himself down halfway down the tower with a handmade rope. At the ground, a crowd of armed guards had already settled in wait. They wouldn't shoot--Stark was too important, even if he was refusing to bend to Moreau's demands--but Eliot couldn't deny they'd rough Stark up a bit.

For a long moment, Stark didn't reply. Then he said, "Up."

He began pulling himself back up, finding little foothold in the stone beside him. Eliot tugged the rope on his end, and within minutes, Stark's hand was grasped in his own. Eliot pulled Tony from out of the window, avoiding Stark's ready kick in favor of knocking him against the wall. He said nothing as he cuffed Tony's wrists together behind his back and ushered him back into his cell. Eliot locked the door behind Stark, and double-checked it for good measure. It wasn't broken; the guard had only been lazy.

"Are you going to uncuff me?"

"Nah," Eliot told him. "If you don't know how to get out of them by now, it can be a learning experience."

Clearly, Stark had too little to do in the tower, if he was still staging escape attempts.

.

By Eliot's next shift, Stark was out of the cuffs.

"I can pay you triple what he pays you," Stark told him that day, all dark-eyed and determined.

"I know," he said, honestly, easily. Stark was a desperate man, and desperate men knew how to pay. Still, he wasn't a turncoat. Stark's price wasn't going to appeal. He knew the second it sunk in for Stark, saw the way his mouth went hard. But not despondent--Stark still had some kind of hope.

"Is that why you're here? Moreau's got his most loyal dog on me?"

Eliot shrugged. "It's easy work."

"You don't look like the type for easy work. You don't fight like the type, either."

It was true; this wasn't his first time at guard duty, but it had still been many years since Eliot had played guard for someone who wasn't Moreau himself. But now, after last month, Eliot couldn't do much else. His hands shook whenever he looked at a gun and remembered what he did. Even Moreau had noticed, and had put him onto this task. A liability, he'd called Eliot.

.

By the time a month had gone by, Eliot's hands were finally steady, as long as he wasn't holding a gun. Stark was in the middle of one of his countless escapes when Eliot came across him.

"You're a fucking idiot," Eliot said.

"Are you going to shoot me or help me?"

Eliot helped him. And he helped himself, leaving Moreau's walls behind, leaving men unconscious in their wake. Only one watched them leave, a drink raised in his hand.

.

Years later, Moreau was behind bars. Eliot's team waited at the door, but Eliot stopped at Moreau's cell.

"Was it worth it?" he asked. "Letting me go?"

Moreau smiled. "Should've just killed you then. But... I knew you were going to leave me soon enough. At least this way, there was someone to take care of you when you left."

"Asshole," Tony told him, giving him one last cigarette. "I didn't need your help."

But Eliot couldn't even argue, because a decade, a couple jobs, and an amazing team later, Tony was still by his side--even if, most of the time, Eliot would characterize it as himself at Tony's back, making sure he didn't get into too much trouble.

Eliot shared one last moment with Moreau, one last thank you to a man he'd once so deeply loved and hated, and left without looking back. He had a genius, idiot man to get back to, after all.