Title: Puppetmaster
Author: Morrighan
Type: Gen
Summary: POV from Shootout. Tom Lockley waits for midnight
Format: Story
Rating: PG-13
Feedback: Please!
Missing Scene: Shootout
A/N: Just a quick character sketch that I had to get out of my head before it drove me insane. The Lockley-Joey team fascinates me far, far too much.

Oh, and my first ever fic in this fandom.

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It is almost midnight, and though Tom Lockley does not allow himself to smile, the satisfaction hums hot and galvanising through his veins.

Joey feels it, so hard that he's almost vibrating with the discipline. He's ready, almost overdue, to be unleashed, straining against Lockley's control like the barely-tamed beast he is. Holder of the leash, Lockley feels the thrill of its power as Joey glances towards him, just once, and then back at the restaurant door. The customers in the restaurant feel it, and they sit tense but motionless, daring to move no further than occasionally to glance around - at him, at Joey, sometimes at each other or that back office door where the injured cop and his partner are holed up. The cop's partner - he feels it too, but he responds differently. His every action is an attempt to break that tension, as if he knows the hold it has over the minds of their victims.

No matter. The fly may struggle against the spider's web, but it won't free him from its snares.

Lockley slides his eyes towards his companion. Joey is focused, rapt with attention, a wild beast couched as to spring, and, as he always does, Lockley feels the surge of power. He owns Joey, Joey is his weapon, just as surely as the piece he holds - a weapon that is almost beyond the wit of man to control, but not beyond his. It is Joey that he aims, and, at the moment of conflict, it is Joey he fires. They are opposites-- he working by intellect and Joey by nerve - but they are equal in skill and in power, and it is that which makes his control of Joey so sweet to the taste. There is no skill, after all, in the domination of an inferior.

Joey loves the action, loves the moment when the tension ends and the fight is on, but Lockley - Lockley lives for these moments of silence that draw out before that final crash. He is the puppet-master, his hands full of strings, and this time is his alone.

There will be too much blood for the rain to wash away.

He hears the clang of the tray with all the frustrated chagrin of coitus interruptus, and then the clamour as the blond cop shatters his silence with gunshots. He sees Joey go down, feels his own shoulder pierced and his piece fall from his hand, and then in barely seconds it is over, his carefully-wrought silence boorishly shattered in the cop's whirl of activity.

The cop is moving briskly, clearing the guns, giving instructions--a black and white, an ambulance and a coroner's wagon - and the room decompresses around him as the wasted tension slackens.

Lockley does not hate, because he considers it unprofessional, so it is with passionless detachment that he decides he will kill the young man if their paths ever cross again.