Title: Color Effects
Summary: AU. Spin-off, ALTERNATE future-timeline, of the "MAIN-DC-Universe," where Damian Wayne and Iris West are two of the ONLY surviving heroes left, in a land ravaged by waging war, furious fires, and desperate for heroes. These two [now-seventeen-year-old], come to rely on each, in much more ways than one. He knows every scar on her body...and how she got them. She knows that all he does is frown...but, that frown can mean more than a book of text, and she is the only one that can translate it. SpeedxDemon
Disclaimer: I don't make money off of this and own no noticeable franchise.
Warning: Character deaths, alien invasion, use of fear gas and mention of illegal substances. Also, SpeedDemon.
Dedication: To RivalsAreAllies for being bold enough to ask for things. He who asks, gets; he who doesn't, doesn't. I feel a little crappy that this wasn't quite on par with the request, but it was…close. Maybe. Kinda. *Goes off to sulk in the corner*

-:-
This person is (pick one):
…On a perilous journey from which he or she may never return.
-Girl, Interrupted.

Black Turrets. The roof that the bomb went off upon shattered easily under the ravaging flux of power sources it was never built to stand against. If it had been able to, anyway, the plan Damian had to kill three birds with one very heavy stone wouldn't have worked and he wouldn't have been able to snatch Irey out of the way while the soldiers were busy reacting to something they hadn't expected.

The seventeen year old Nightwing (he could not be Batman as he had hoped he would be at this age; the cape was too heavy and the burden had become too great when his father had surrendered himself for a suicide attack after Drake had been killed publically and Dick had fallen earlier the year before, not to bombs or weapons or in some great battle, but to a specialized virus bearing quite a few similarities to Consumption with some Pancreatic Cancer thrown in for good measure that none of them saw as pleasant in the end), snatched Irey's unconscious form out from under the foot of the soldier who'd been lucky to land a dart in her neck. His steel tipped boot caved in the soldier's kneecap as an afterthought and then the two (the last) heroes were covered up in smoke and debris; easy enough when they could fight blind.

A vanishing act was easy when people had as much practice as they did.

Orange Jumpsuits. It's a bit too much of a skip and a hop for new clothes when the old ones get blown up, but a good year ago (around the time Irey got that scar along the underside of her foot from a landmine that hadn't been rendered inert by a rather creative mix of cunning and some old magic tricks Damian had left over from training with Zatanna before she found herself at the wrong end of a Reach weapon) Damian had wrangled up a hospital's abandoned scrubs and they had enough to last when they were too tired from fighting to go out for jeans and T-shirts and leather-leather-leather.

The orange scrubs don't do his face much good. They make his frown (small though it is around her, it is still what it is and can't be seen as anything else after a battle and rescuing her hide) scream volumes of rage that cannot be seen in the way he holds his fists at his sides to keep from punching the wall. Irey misses the periwinkle blue scrubs from the week before, but they were gone as soon as they were used—too easy to spot when out on the street and looking for supplies (for her; he kept hoping that if they split off in separate directions, there was a chance that he would find a collective of lost heroes that would rise up under his notice and come with him and her to help do something about the state the world had been in for years now).

Irey looked over at his frowning face ("I should have been there sooner, I should never have let you get into that situation") and sighed, rubbing at the circular wound hidden under her own pumpkin scrubs (that had been quite the surprise; a Reach soldier carrying a human weapon when they spit on the species as a whole); her nails digging in before her fingers pulled away and she set a hand onto his shoulder.

Yellow License Plates. The numbers etched into one of the walls of their hideaway seemed to be shouting at Damian more than they should have—more than usual—that evening (old plates from cop cars that carried officers worth a damn; memorials to all the motorcycles and cars the Batcaln had to amuse themselves at the faces of people that tried to get pictures of them; some tags from the property of others heroes [Steel, Blue Beetle, Vigilante, even poor Jimmy Olsen] that have given themselves to fight a war that nobody else could). Irey couldn't help that (she never could, even in the beginning of this nightmare of a war between humanity and that alien race that had come down to use the Earth as yet another resource for their empire), but she offered Damian a small smile.

"Hey, at least we got the food we needed…and the codes to some of their prisons. We're that much closer to ending the mission, Dami."

She could see his teeth when he responded (looking so much like Jason on his last run with the Outlaws, before he'd been taken and experimented on for the secret to immortality; inevitably dying when they'd tried to get a better picture of his beating from the Joker—his nerves couldn't handle reintroducing the trauma) to her attempt at making him feel better.

"And what if the Reach Negotiator has changed the codes just to be safe? He'll be looking over that site we were just at and checking for our remains. He never let's anything get in his way—you know that, Impulse."

Lilac Candles. Her hand had not been shrugged away, so she pushed her luck and brought the other hand up, kneading fingers into the raw and tight muscles of his shoulder blades and the muscles along his neck (like he had when she'd once been smashed head first into a wall by a soldier during her attempt to get some possible metas out of a holding station—she'd failed, and had a horrid concussion that he'd tried to soothe away with light touches and deep kisses while she'd cried tears that must have tasted horrible to him) to do something to lighten the moment. It was her duty as a Speedster (the last one standing) to make a Bat as happy as she could and she would do so until she died.

He could smell the perfume she wore (well, not perfume, so to speak; mostly a concoction of what shampoos she could snatch while on patrol, some conditioner mixed in, and body wash that was even harder to get after she'd given a large batch to some women in the prisons to clean themselves up with after rough days under the watch of their captors) as her thumbs grooved into the ridges of his skin that were hardest to soothe; her head reaching forward and kissing the back of his neck where the touch allowed for all of his nerve endings to light a fire under his grumpy, angst riddled exterior.

"'T ain't all bad, Dami. We just have to wait. We've waited this long and a little longer won't be the death of tough cookies like us."

The incense sticks that he'd gotten Irey (that they wanted to use to clear out the smell of their hideaway, but couldn't because it would attract too much attention to the Reach ground patrol) sat on a nearby work bench Damian used every single evening; a hopeful reminder of what could be if Nightwing worked a little harder and Irey ran a little faster. He blinked over at them and then onto the motorcycle and parts scattered about the cement floor (awful, awful how their only home for the moment was either a hospital Zachary Zatarra had placed in an old underground railway tunnel—before he'd died with Kid Devil; all blood and bile and hands still holding each other when the smoke cleared—or Static's garage that he'd given to them, point blank, when he'd gone off to rescue Gear and never came back [both Irey and Damian only being fourteen at the time, and saddened already by Superman being caught and held on another planet with a red sun])with his frown shifting into something less like Poe.

Baby's Breath. Times like the present were when he really wished that he could offer her more symbolic gestures of affection (candy from the corner store; flowers snipped at the ends and put into warm water with packaged chemicals to make them live longer; a movie that considered to recreate horror that wasn't lived, but only imagined) then setting them onto the foldout couch they shared each night and give her an attempt at something not-quite-a-frown.

It's a thin substitute for an actual smile, but her own is big enough to make up for it.

Apple Cider. When he reaches over to touch, at this time and every time that has or will ever come, the shape of the room tends to mix and become somewhat like falling into a murky water lake that smells of fermented fruits that are or are not fruits (depending entirely on the smell; half bitter and half sweet) and he feels as if he'd stepping down a long staircase and misses the last step. His knee jerks up from its place and his head rushes around and around…

Butterfly Burgundy. The tube isn't so much ripped out of his throat, as it is yanked out to keep him from biting into it and then into his tongue or his lips—something Irey genuinely does not want since Robin's father had already stitched that lip and he would not be pleased if he came back from looking for Scarecrow and Mirror Master and found that Impulse had not done her job in making sure Damian didn't do something to himself in his sleep. His sleep that had been on again and off for only short bursts of five minutes in the whole of the fourteen days he'd been strapped down in the little medical bed in the Batcave.

When the long medical tube finally made an ugly Pop! on its way out of Damian's throat, Irey reached over quickly into the little first aid kit she'd had out since left in charge of the boy (his brothers were all wiped out from watching him writhe under the affects of Crane's new fear gas [adages combined with some sort of trick powder he'd gotten from the Mirror Master even the other Rogues in Keystone City barely tolerated] and had gone off to catch a few hours' sleep with the condition that Irey would call them down if Damian was coherent) and pulled out a couple of cotton balls to sneak under his tongue and on top of his back teeth to prevent him from doing anymore damage to himself. The feeling of his saliva on her costume-free fingers wasn't really very pleasant, but she didn't have time to wipe the them off on the bedsheet before Damian blinked bloodshot eyes at her and snatched her hand into his grip.

It wasn't tight enough to be like last time and Irey paused calling for Alfred to look at how little he looked like his face might fracture from frowning like his father when he was vulnerable like this. All alone with nobody but her and the bats flying about in the deeper recesses of the cave, he looked his age.

"Hey, hey, hey," she rambled painfully close to speedster speech, allowing him to keep her hand even as his tongue flicked around inside his mouth before spitting the dampened cotton balls to the left of the bed, each of them making a sound uncomfortably similar to guano reaching impact on the stone that served as a floor for the Batclan, "It's okay, it's okay! Whatever you were seeing, it wasn't real—"

"Don't tell your brother," Damian started, voice cracked and strained from that tube pressing into his windpipe for days and days, "But you're actually really pretty…"

Irey blinked a couple of times too many and before she could ask what (the frick) he meant by that, the boy coughed up one more cotton ball that landed on the bedsheets near her knee. He was asleep again in the next second and there was nothing she could do about that…. But she might try later.