He Isn't Here

Oneshot: Growing up in the slums of Moscow. Being tortured in a Siberian prison. Clawing his way to the top of the Russian mob. All these things Vladimir Ranskahov has survived, and his lover winds up in a busy morgue at midnight, praying to every deity she's ever heard of that he's survived just one more disaster on a night when disaster seems to be the only thing Hell's Kitchen is capable of producing. Vladimir Ranskahov x OC

Warnings: OC, language, grief

The morgue was busier than the hospital, and why wouldn't it be, after the night the Kitchen had seen? Four explosions, hundreds dead, dozens more mortally wounded, just clinging to life with ever-increasing tenuousness in the city's hospitals.

I stood to the side of the hallway, out of the flow of traffic. I couldn't seem to get in gear, couldn't seem to make myself either move towards the examination suites, the offices, or out the door and back into the sweltering summer night. My back pressed against the cool tiles stretching three-quarters of the way up the wall. I couldn't even get my eyes to train on the people rushing around, pushing gurney after gurney, each loaded down with a long black body-bag. All I seemed capable of was staring at the scuffed up tile, watching the shoes of the medical staff scurrying around and sometimes tripping over the boots of the EMTs and police as they wheeled their grisly cargo through the meandering halls.

There was blood tracked on the bright white floor. This wasn't usual protocol – somebody would've mopped up the crimson tracks by now on a regular night. This was a clean, mostly sanitary place, after all. But there was nothing regular about this night, nothing routine, nothing normal. How could it be, when the Kitchen's morgue usually saw a dozen dead bodies on a busy night. Now they were drowning in corpses. So the bloody footprints stayed there, drying and peeling on the tile, and I stayed in the hall, watching them dry.

I don't know what I was waiting for. Either he was here or he wasn't, and the only way I was going to find out was by finding somebody – hopefully Miranda – and asking.

It was surreal, standing there. I felt like I was in a dream, only it was one that's too close to reality, where the colors are too dull, the light is too bright, and you have a feeling it's more nightmare than dream.

I didn't feel anything: not the gut-twisting anxiety I'd had after the phone call, after the line went dead and Vlad's choked-out, slurred voice was no more than an echo in my brain; not the boulder-on-my-chest pressure that had settled in at the police station, when a snot-nosed rookie had said, in unreasonably blasé tones, "Ma'am, if your man was at that warehouse tonight, he's at the morgue. If not, I don't know what to tell ya." All I felt was that my brain was set on slow-motion, and the world around me was moving too fast.

And there was no pull here. No otherworldly tug at my soul, leading me to one of the lockers, nothing pushing at my heart, telling me that my lover was here.

Not that I necessarily expected it – these things only happen in movies, don't they? – but I could almost, almost think that because I felt no particular tug, that he wasn't here. He couldn't be here. He was Vlad, for fuck's sake. Three years in a Siberian prison couldn't kill him, there was no way in hell somebody in New York could do it.

But Anatoly… he had survived that prison too. And look what happened to him.

I drew a deep breath, but found I couldn't pull it into the bottom of my lungs. I tried again, and again, and only found myself on the way toward hyperventilating. I pressed my back, my head, my palms into the wall, and tried to breathe.

It took me a minute to realize I was being talked at. I blinked up to see Miranda's face, staring at me from a halo of caramel-colored bed-hair, having obviously been pulled from peaceful slumber and thrust into this nightmare. "What, Mercy's all out of EMTs, they're sending bodies with nurses now?"

I shook my head, or think I did. It felt jerky, disjointed, my body refusing to cooperate with this simple action. I decided it wouldn't be a good idea to move away from the wall at this point. I didn't want to collapse and have somebody mistake me for a corpse.

I tried to speak, to make some off the cuff, smart remark. Nothing came. Nothing worked. Miranda was called away, and then it was just me, the bloody floor, and the world moving around us again.

Could it have been only this morning that I woke Vlad with a kiss? I could still feel the scratch of his stubble, the soft warmth of his lips. His hair stuck out in all directions on the pillow, a golden crown; his eyes were slits in his face, squinting against the light filtering through the window.

I was still feeling his rough and bed-warm hand on my neck when Miranda's face swam back into my line of vision.

"You aren't here on official business, are you?"

The shake of my head must have been perceptible this time, given her shoulder-heaving sigh. Her knitting of brows. Her voice, when she spoke again, wasn't in the tone of friendship, but the professional candences of The Medical Examiner. "I don't know who you're looking for, but you have to know we've barely scratched the surface of identification at this point. I don't know what, if any, information I can give you right now. If you give me the information-" the dead person you're looking for – "I'll call you when I know something."

What do you want me to do? I thought at her. Go home?

That was unthinkable, going home, where Kirill would be staring at the door, whining, waiting for Daddy to come home, ears perked and tail wagging at each noise. Where Vlad's clothes clustered in the hamper, his jacket slung over the back of the chair. Where I could still smell him, that mix of his shampoo, cologne, and the sharp scent of hot gun metal. Home. Where Vlad wasn't.

The world blurred, and I cleared my throat, determined to speak. "I can't," I managed with difficulty. "I don't… I c-… I can't."

She sighed again, but there was a softening to the professional mask she'd pulled on. "Do you know where it happened?"

I started to shake my head – I had no idea where – but stopped. I swallowed the lump sitting in my throat. "A warehouse," I rasped, but held up a hand when she started telling me there had been four warehouses that had gone up in flames. But it hadn't been fire, smoke inhalation, or a collapsing building that would have done for him, if he was here. "It… it would've been a gunshot wound…" Or multiple, a horrible whisper in my head told me. A dozen, or a hundred. Suddenly his voice was echoing in my head from that call, him telling me that this wasn't how he was going to die, his raspy breath, and the hail of gunfire that sounded just before the line went dead…

Breathe, I tried to remind myself. Breathe.

Christ, did I really want to do this?

No. No, I didn't, I wanted to go home, to see Vlad there waiting for me, and collapse, sobbing like a child, into his arms.

But I had to know.

I cleared my throat again. "A gunshot, or… multiple, at a warehouse. Tonight."

There was a look of recognition sweeping onto her face, then a quick tinge of pain. "The boy?" She asked, then stopped herself. "The young man, the… officer?" When I hesitated, she added, with a grimace, "One of the ESU guys?"

I shook my head, cleared my throat, and focused eyes suddenly welling on the ugly, water-stained ceiling tiles. "No, um… he's… about six-one. Short blond hair. Um…" I lifted a hand, and traced a finger down my face from my right eyebrow to my right jaw. "Scar," is all I managed before my throat closed. I didn't look at her. If she recognized that description, it meant he was here.

"I'll… see what I can do." There was something new in her tone now, something I wasn't able to place, or to name. Just a drop of it. Just enough to terrify me.

Time passed. It might've been five minutes, maybe three hours. I couldn't say. All I knew was the bloody footprints on the tile multiplied as more bodies were carted in, and every time the door swung open, a hot breeze would sweep into the cool air-conditioned hall, like the breath of a sleeping dragon. Like the gates of hell opening and closing, opening and closing.

Miranda reappeared. "Come on," she said, and after some convincing, my feet followed hers. She lead me down the crowded hall, lined with gurneys and bodies, littered with ME staff, past examination rooms, past clusters of uniformed cops and flustered detectives. She stopped by a door marked Supply Room, and slid the ME Mask over her features again. "This isn't protocol. My job - and yours - will be on the line if this gets out, but…" The mask cracked. "I'm sorry, it isn't… it's the only quiet place right now. I'm… I'm sorry." She reached out, gave my shoulder a squeeze, handed me a smile of condolence, and opened the door.

Tall metal shelves were stacked with chucks pads, paper drapes, sterile saline, 4x4s, boxes of syringes, cleaning supplies. And in front of me there was a gurney, and a long still form covered in a blue paper drape.

I heard the door click closed behind me, the sound of the madness outside drifting away.

There was a tall rolling stool covered in soft leather sitting beside the gurney. Beside the body. I let my bag fall off my shoulder, and swung it out of the way. I sat on the chair, and rolled to the head of the gurney, and stared at the blue paper.

This is all a dream. A nightmare. I'll pull back the sheet and it will be Vlad, but this isn't real. It's all a just a dream. Just a horrible, horrible dream.

My fingers closed on the thin blue paper, and pulled it down.

Two thoughts converged in my brain like trains racing toward each other on the same track, and they met with an earth-shattering bang. The first was It's not him. The second was Oh, my God, no.

The second was more accurate.

This wasn't the face I knew, not at first glance. He'd been beaten to hell. His face was a quilt of broken skin, of swollen, half-flowered bruises, of dried blood. It was everywhere, the blood. Someone – Miranda – had done a quick job of cleaning it off, but it was stubborn, clinging to him, congealed in his hair, caked the crevices of his face and neck. It nearly camouflaged the long jagged scar on his cheek. But not quite.

The tattoo on his chest, beneath the still-damp, unbuttoned collar of his shirt, peeking out from beneath a superfluous bulletproof vest, stood out in stark relief against the paleness of his skin. Blood was soaking into the blue paper sheet and blooming like flowers there.

I scooted forward, my knees and the chair jutting against the gurney. Carefully, carefully, I set a hand on his chest, feeling his lukewarm skin, my hand sticking in the drying blood. I saw now that there was a ragged bullet hole in the far side of his neck, and another in his bicep. The way the blue sheet was blooming with red, like a summer poppy field, there had to be more.

But I couldn't look. I didn't need to. The world was blurring, but I kept blinking, not wanting to see this but needing to, not wanting to remember him here but needing to keep my eyes on him. My hand, coated in crimson, slid up his neck. An action I had performed a few hundred times, only now, no pulse beat against my palm. My hand wasn't seized and kissed.

There was a noise in the room, like nothing human. Like a wounded animal, facing down its abuser. A pleading sound. It took me a while to realize it was me.

"Vlad," I finally managed, and that was it, there were no more ignorable tears. I leaned forward, sobbing silently, not wanting to bring anyone in from outside with the sound, not wanting another person to see him like this, to see me like this, to disturb this last moment together. I laid my forehead against his bloody chest, and cried.

I don't know how long I stayed there, diluting the blood on his bulletproof vest with my tears. A few times I felt like they might be ebbing, like I was catching my breath, then the reality of sitting up and walking out of the room and leaving him there hit me, and I collapsed again.

When at last I could sit up, tears still seeping out of my eyes, I drew a ragged breath and stood up. Instead of heading for the door, I grabbed a handful of 4x4s, and went to the sink, dousing them in cold water. I sat back down, setting them on my denim-clad thigh, despite the cold wetness, and cleaned him up, still sniffling, still struggling to catch my breath in this place that smelled like cleaning supplies and faintly of formaldehyde. I washed his face, gently wiping off the streaks and splatters and pools of blood. I sluiced water over the hair around his face, and smoothed out the blood, then combed it back with my fingers. When the 4x4s were red and brown and crusted, I went back and got more, until a pile built up at my feet and my jeans were dripping. I cleaned his face until I could see there the man I spent my nights with. Then I buried my face in my dripping hands and cried some more.

If Miranda or any of the other MEs had a problem with my meddling with his face – as if the dozen bullet holes riddling his body hadn't been the cause of death – they could go directly to hell.

I cleaned up my mess, washed the blood off my hands. Wiped my face and blew my nose. Then returned to the stool, and stared at his face, my hand, for lack of a hand to hold - I feared groping beneath the blue and scarlet paper cover – back on his chest.

"You said you'd be home," I whispered, my voice like gravel. "You said if I waited for you, you'd be home."

There didn't seem to be much else to say.

That's where Miranda found me a while later. She said my name once, then again. I glanced over my shoulder, looking at the floor, not her face. "You need to go. The chief of D's is coming down with his detectives, a whole slew of them. This isn't somewhere you want to be found by the big-wigs."

No. Not sitting in a storage closet with a body. The body of a Russian mob boss, certainly. And Miranda knew that. Whether the cops had told her when they brought him in, or she had somehow seen him in connection with Anatoly…

I nodded. "I'll be out in two minutes." The door clicked closed again, and I turned back to Vlad.

I started trying to memorize his face, before realizing it was futile. I already knew it by heart. How many times had I kissed that mouth, caressed those cheeks, traced the roundness of his chin, ran a finger down the length of that scar? How many times had I kissed the knitting of his brow, until he was smiling? How many nights had I watched and waited for the stern look of a boss to melt away, and seen a smile creeping onto that face? How many times had that mouth traced the curves of my body? How many times had I looked into those eyes?

"I love you, Vladimir," I said, pointlessly. If he didn't already know that, well, it was a little late now. But I repeated it anyway. "I love you."

I stood up, and pressed my lips against his. They were cool, not quite cold, not yet. His stubble scratched my skin, and a small twitch of a smile tried itself out on my face. I put my hand on his cheek, and kissed his mouth again, his chin, his forehead. The word goodbye bubbled in my throat, but it wasn't going to come out. I wasn't going to let it.

I passed the Chief of Detectives on the way out, with Vlad's blood crusting beneath my fingernails. I wondered what justice would be done to whoever was responsible for this night's carnage. If it was like anything else in Hell's Kitchen, there wouldn't be any justice. Just more blood.

A/N: The Ranskahov's are my problematic faves, and I wanted somebody to grieve for Vladimir (even though technically we never saw a dead body, so I'm still holding out a stubborn sort of hope that we'll see him again. Hey, it is Marvel after all.). I liked the idea of him having a girlfriend outside the usual lady-mobsters and "business associates". Someone arguably normal to love and grieve for this decidedly unnormal Russian. Thanks for reading, and I hope you enjoy! - C