Tick.... tock.....

Slower than seconds. The weary arm swings lazily between its two eternal stops, sorting time into neat chunks and piling them onto the past.

The room is dead. Stubborn dust hangs thick, choking the air and shoving around tired, recycled light.

There they sit, framing the clock. Still and silent, ancient as tortoises in their arm-chair shells. They don't move anymore. Their concentration is at its limit. Between their dead-locked gaze the battle rages on an invisible plane.

Frail hands grip the peeling wood. Marks in the cracked varnish record where finger nails have dug in younger, more desperate times. The broken and burnt futniture filling the room around the old men remembers a time of physical fighting.

But no more. Now one vies for control of the other, and the war is a matter of will.

Defeat will fall on the first to succumb to age.