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This masked man is shorter than Vladimir expected; he had assumed such a figure would be a big man, an intimidating one. Not to say that the masked man, with his boxer’s pose and his mouth firm, isn’t intimidating. He’s just not very tall.
“He is not so tough,” Anatoly murmurs, spitting, and Vladimir is unable to agree. He has gotten this far, has become more than a small annoyance. He is tough enough.
They have the men fight for them, never directly interacting, and the masked man is driven off wounded but alive. “Goodbye!” Vladimir yells after him, mocking, and watches him go, more concerned with Anatoloy’s broken ribs than he is with a foolish man who will be dead soon.
It’s just Matt’s luck that he would be invited to a party that the Ranskahov brothers are also attending; his friend Jill always did run in strange circles but he’ll have to be watchful about her from now on.
The Russians are jovial, laughing in the corner and Matt can’t quite ignore them, can only offer distracted smiles to the other party goers who don’t seem to realize they only have half his attention.
“Matt, you have to meet Vlad and Anatoly. Guys, this is Matt, the lawyer," Jill is saying, taking him gently by the arm to guide him to the Russians; no one can smell the blood under their nails, the gunpowder on their fingertips. Matt can.
He holds out his hand to shake, feels one and then the other hand take his, and ignores the way that one of the brothers pauses, ignores the arousal pooling in the man’s gut and the fast pace of his heart. People have been attracted to him before, it’s nothing new.
“As she said: Hi, I’m Matt, the lawyer,” he says aloud, grinning, leaving his hands at his sides, one loosely resting on his cane. His soulmark is so ordinary that he has to come up with unusual first sentences. The brother on the left’s heart starts to pound, and Matt has a sudden, horrifying thought.
“Jill has told us you are a fascinating man,” the brother on the left says. “Anatoly does not believe all her claims.” Not the words of his soulmark; Matt relaxes. So Vladimir is the brother who is so attracted to him. He files that away, shrugs his shoulders.
“She exaggerates,” he says mildly, which is true enough so they all laugh and Matt is allowed to fade into the background again, leaves the party early after soothing Jill’s concerns about him walking alone so late at night.
“I can walk him back,” Vladimir says, and pushes until it would be rude for Matt to refuse. The thought of them knowing where he lives is mildly horrifying but can’t be helped, so he takes the arm Vladimir offers, feeling the heat of him through the sleeve.
Matt is almost expecting to be threatened as they amble down the street, to have Vladimir tug him into an alley with a knife to his throat. But of course, no one connects a harmless blind lawyer to the masked man, so they instead talk casually as they walk the few blocks to Matt’s apartment.
“Are you planning to stay in New York for very long?” Matt asks, grasping for casual, intensely aware of every shift Vladimir makes, the smell of him and the way his heart beats.
“Me and my brother, there was some struggle to come here. Russia can be a challenging country,” Vladimir says, and Matt has to admit that walking with him is easy; he doesn’t feel tugged along, and Vladimir does not walk so slow that Matt feels like a stumbling child. “Now that we are here, we plan to stay.” Unfortunate, but useful to know. Matt will have to put more effort into ruining their operations if they aren’t going to leave on their own. “And you, what do you do?”
“I’m a lawyer. I run a practice with my partner,” Matt answers, not wanting to give him the information but wanting even more not to seem suspicious.
“You must be very intelligent, then.” Vladimir says this like it’s expected, as a given. Admiring.
Matt is beginning to feel confused but they’ve reached his door so he’s able to give a polite goodbye and head up the stairs, feeling Vladimir’s eyes on his back.
He doesn’t breathe easily until he’s reached his apartment and locked the door, leaning his back against it. Something prickles uneasily in his chest. Thank God Vladimir hadn’t said, “Goodbye,” which runs in thick black letters under the bridge of Matt’s ribs. At least one thing has gone right with his day.
Vladimir wasn’t expecting to meet his soulmate in this huge American city; he had thought they would be waiting for him back in Russia, maybe for when he returns a rich man. But here he is, rubbing at the neat black words running along his left calf. “As she said: Hi, I’m Matt, the lawyer.”
He had assumed the man would come to him right then, had felt a little jolt of awareness and expectation. But the man, Matthew, hadn’t reacted, even though his sentence was too unusual to reasonably belong to anyone else. Vladimir hasn’t met him before; he would’ve remembered a blind man with a face like that. Surely Matt knows his words, they would’ve appeared in childhood and someone will have read them to him anyway. A doctor or something.
He spends some time thinking on this, and he is not a stupid man. He has met so few new people recently, being mostly with his men and Anatoly, occasionally talking to Fisk who, thank Christ, is not his soulmate. So.The only new person he has met whose face he didn’t see was the masked man’s, a man approximately the same size and shape as Matt Murdock. Grief settles in his heart. His life has always been difficult, and now there is another burden on his shoulders. A soulmate who is not just normal. He could have worked with a soulmate who isn’t a criminal; Fisk is doing so, and Vladimir would have been comfortable lying about his work. But a soulmate who stands against everything Vladimir is trying to build? His life is nothing but dirt. At least the masked man is pretty.
Matt thinks he might be going insane. The Ranskahov brothers have pulled back from him entirely; he’d think they disappeared if they weren’t committing crimes in other parts of the city, avoiding Hell’s Kitchen. Let the other heroes deal with them, then, if they’re going to leave Matt’s territory.
He has enough to deal with, trying to fight off Fisk and avoid Foggy’s pointed questions. He could almost forget the Ranskahov brothers if the memory of Vladimir wasn’t so unsettling, didn’t prick at something he doesn’t want to explore in the back of his mind.
And then it all goes to hell; Foggy leaving and Fisk attacking and Matt running through the sewers with half the city after him, baying at his heels.
He almost stumbles over Vladimir Ranskahov, his heartbeat is so slow. He mumbles something in Russian before reaching for Matt’s legs, trying to pull him closer and Matt is so taken aback he goes, standing over Vladimir, who reeks of blood. “Let me tell you a secret, masked man,” Vladimir says, shifting. He has an attractive voice. Matt hates himself a little for thinking that.
Vladimir knows the man in the mask didn’t kill Anatoly; he has looked into Matt Murdock’s eyes and saw no trace of a killer. Perhaps if Anatoly was still alive Vladimir would not be here, bleeding out in a sewer with his soulmate standing above him. Vladimir never did learn how a blind man fights like Matthew does and now, he supposes, he never will.
He tips his head back, against the wall, motions for Matthew to sit before realizing he can’t see. “Come. Sit with me.”
“We have to go,” Matthew hisses, and Vladimir realizes that Matthew intends to save him, heroic to the end.
He laughs, hacks up a bubble of blood from the agony that’s become his chest. “You would save a man like me?” he asks, watches while Matthew tilts his head, listening, as a dog would.
“I’m going to save everyone.”
“I do not deserve it. Think of what I did to your friend, the nurse.”
“You can change.”
Vladimir grins. “Are you so sure of that?” He isn’t so sure, himself. Kindness has never come easily to him.
“Yes.”
But Vladimir can see the doubt flicker across his face, knows that his sins are being weighed and coming up heavy.
“Then let me tell you something.” Matthew hesitates, Vladimir reduced to tugging weakly at his pants leg. “It’s important. Come.” He waits until Matthew is crouching, all thrumming energy, allows his hands to fall at his sides. “I am your soulmate.”
Matt can hear the weak pound of Vladimir’s heart, the twisting pain in his scent. There’s not a trace of doubt in any part of him.
“I knew at the party. Your mark reads Goodbye, it must.”
Matt nods, falls fully to the floor and doesn’t think about the water soaking through his pants, or the shouts of angry men getting closer. “You never told me.”
“Other matters were in the way.”
“Mm.” A world of other matters, two sides of other matters. What Matt used to consider good and evil. Now his soulmate is before him, undeniably a bad man, and Matt wonders what that says about who he truly is. He can’t think about it; he’s so tired, and Vladimir is coughing wetly.
All his life Matt has waited. Here he is. Not Elektra or Foggy or Karen, but the man Matt most deserves.
He slouches against the wall with him, and allows Vladimir’s head to loll onto his shoulder. The sewer is an echoing nightmare of gunfire and blood; Matt no longer feels quite real. He takes his mask off, because he might as well. Vladimir’s eyes are probably on his face. Matt is unsure what he’ll see there.
“I am sorry, Matthew,” Vladimir says finally. Matt shrugs, accidentally jostling him and hearing a gasp of pain, murmurs his own apology before they lapse back into silence. The water trickles down. They wait.