**Written for the FanFic100 challenge**
Of Black and Scarlet
Prompt #011. Fire.
Before the red has died down on Uriah Heep's face – the cruel, burning swathe from temple to jaw – he has seethed, and fumed, and made horrible vows to himself of treacheries yet to come. It is not so much the strike that infuriates him – in truth, he has kicked dogs in the street harder than David Copperfield's paltry slap – but it is the realization that any hold he had upon the upstart is dissolved, that somehow Copperfield has the better of him, is possessed of some secret he cannot ferret out. Wickfield is his, Dr. Strong is his, Micawber is his, even Agnes is powerless to do anything he does not will; yet the one man he hates with the intense hatred of jealous ambition and aim is free of his power, and it galls him.
The color – or rather, the colorlessness – returns to his face, yet that night's mischief is not done. Rambling down the streets like a broken windmill dashed along the road, he keeps to darkness, as though his paleness will absorb the very shadow; rushing back to the house, he once more clutches the books of accounts in his wasted hands; in the height of his emotion, he stares recklessly at his angel's window, infinitely removed from the ground on which he treads, and blows a poisoned kiss to the window to curse her and drag her into his power.
Uriah Heep knows that things may come to an end, that all things have their season, and that double treachery, careful planning, vicious lying, are the only rafters for his castles in the sky. And he instinctively puts his hand to his lank face, his great splay fingers plastered over the faint print of David Copperfield's own mark of violence, and the red in his eye seems to drain the blood from every pore, in its vivid intensity.