Both men sat drinking tea facing each other, never moving their gaze. Both sets of deathly still eyes had seen things unheard of to the majority of the ordinary population. And similarly, both eyes held a multitude of sins. They held secrets and anger and rage: a rage so strong at the world around them for the hand it had dealt them and condemned them to live with. The eyes held demons and monsters which began to kill the men from the inside out. They were uncannily similar. What separated the pair was what they were made of. One was composed of fire which sizzled in his every move and scorched all that he touched. It was like the fire from Hell which he was damned too and it could burn down a kingdom if commanded. The other man was created from ice, ice that had frozen his heart to stillness and would bite others with its needle-like shards. Both were deadly, vicious and cruel in their torrid destruction.
Both men wanted the same thing but neither could have it. They both wanted to win the game but they did not want the other to lose. For the other to lose would mean to mark themselves the victor. If they won that implied the other was lesser, weaker, not truly the equal match they so dearly craved. And these men who had been destined to come together did not want to be separated by anything. Not now. They had spent so long alone already and to finally meet their equivalent, even if they were rivals, was almost inconceivable to the two of them. Both men had sworn to stop the other- but how could they when the ruin of the other would mean the demise of themselves. But as fire and ice, inevitably they would uniformly destroy each other.
James Moriarty and Sherlock Holmes, the consulting criminal and the consulting detective, the psychopath and the sociopath, the king and the ace. They were bound by a force that tied their threads of life together in an undoable knot where equal destruction was the only release. And neither of them would have changed any of it. Because they needed each other like oxygen and it was possibly the closest feeling to love that either could muster and emulate- that hopeless feeling of reliance they felt towards their counterpart. Because for all intents and purposes they were each other.
So they sat there, the two sinning men with nowhere left to run. They were positioned with perfect symmetry, one at each side of the room in an armchair- an exact mirror image. Suddenly in less time than it takes to blink the perfect picture began to crackle and the two men appeared to switch sides if for an instant. Neither appeared to notice. But it happened again, and then another time, until the scene was constantly moving, faster and faster, the flickering images running into each other like a reel of film until it was impossible to say who was who.