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Abel Gideon didn't remember much, but he also didn't remember not remembering.
More to the point, he didn't remember forgetting. Rather, much like a person who has unwittingly gotten ink on their hands while writing a manuscript or a memoir, it was only when he took a moment to stop and assess did he notice enormous portions of his identity had been blotted out by seemingly permanent darkness. Any recreation thus was bound to be imperfect.
So it had been, and quite deliberately so. Were he able to reflect upon this fact properly, Gideon would have perhaps considered it temporarily irrelevant, second only to his recovery from the head wound he'd suffered at Will Graham's hands. He had not been killed by the shot, had even been conscious enough to feel himself collapsing backwards but not so much that he'd felt any pain. His mind was both far away from his body and trapped painfully close within it… so nothing he was not already familiar with.
His blood stained the snow outside Dr. Alana Bloom's house, though not permanently. Still, when he retained consciousness again he would wonder if she would always look at that spot and think of him, a permanent installation on the walls of her thoughts. And did he hope that was the case? He couldn't make up his mind. He respected Alana Bloom, and if he was to leave her with anything before they never again saw each other, fear wasn't his first choice. It would do if he had no other choice, but it wasn't ideal.
"Alive?" He'd apparently murmured when first emerging from the depths of his coma (if it could be called that) -- he'd been inquiring after her, not himself. He couldn't remember if he'd killed her or not; all his memories displayed for him was her image in the window, Will Graham's silhouette, the biting sensation of cold at his ears and nose and the distant sound of a gunshot. Without being able to confirm his delirious inquiry either way he'd drifted off again.
Gideon had not been a man who many doctors would label as traditionally suicidal. Nor was he a man who would identify as such, either -- Gideon's thoughts about his own death were not quite so organized. He didn't wish himself dead nor entertain possibilities of methods thereof, but on more than one occasion he had thought about how much simpler it might be if he was. There would be no more questions, no more desperation to pick apart the real from the fabricated, no more fearing -- or perhaps knowing -- that the life he was living was no longer his own, and that he might exhaust all options and still not know any more than when he started.
It was an abstract, but one that bled onto his gaze of Alana Bloom that night when he'd stood outside her house. He hadn't wanted to kill her, truly, but he was in no state of mind to fathom an alternative or understand how doing so was not his solution.
For all that, Will Graham's bullet had been a mercy.
There was no real sense of passing time; one day he had been unconscious and the next day he hadn't been, unable to do much more than to simply observe reality continuing on around him. He felt dissociated from anything, lacking voice or at least lacking interest to use it when he might otherwise be communicating his tired but wry commentary to the attending staff.
Sometimes he did without noticing.
"That nurse over there…" His voice had been weak, throat dry. "She just got engaged, didn't she?"
"Pardon me, Dr. Gideon?" Asked his attending, his speech evidently catching her off-guard. She looked in the direction that he was looking. "I believe so. A couple of days ago. She'll be taking some time off for the wedding."
"Shame," he'd commented, seemingly unaware still he was engaged in a conversation until his gaze unclouded and he looked to his attending again. "I thought the two of you made a better team… no offense intended toward the intended."
"I hope you aren't trying to play matchmaker, Dr. Gideon," said his physician with some amusement, clearly wary. He'd looked at her and shook his head.
"Oh, no. I'd never." Which he meant -- Gideon didn't consider casually wishing relationships upon a person an act of kindness. "Strictly in the professional sense. Clearly I've been well-cared for. Be sure to give Jennifer my regards."
"Her name isn't Jennifer," said his attending patiently. "Who are you thinking of?"
Gideon didn't respond. He couldn't answer that question, because he didn't know; it would pass, his doctors had assured him when he'd first regained consciousness, some amnesia was not uncommon when recovering from serious head injuries. More so than usual Gideon's identity evaded him, but he was frequently assured he was making progress. Changing the subject, he asked his doctor for a glass of water.
Jennifer? Maybe she had been important. He remembered Alana Bloom, Will Graham, and Frederick Chilton clearly enough. He remembered in varying degrees of clarity or reliably what he had done to each of them, or had done to him by each. Other names and faces circled abstractly still: Jack Crawford was somebody important, he was certain, as was the woman with the red curls and the man with the piercingly cold eyes and hint of a Lithuanian accent. Gideon felt no particular sense of loss about this; not much of importance could have been misplaced by Will Graham's bullet, he was certain, that had not already been previously obscured.
There were other bits and pieces. He remembered that he was married, of course, although details about his wife still eluded the recovery process -- his doctors were avoiding getting too specific for fear it may trigger any psychotic relapse. He remembered that he was a surgeon, and even briefly remembered being one; the routine of putting on scrubs and sanitizing his hands, his amiable demeanor with his nurses on the days he hadn't receded, withdrawn and dismissive, too far into his own head. Even now, his fingers could flex with the ease of habit and muscle memory -- they always knew what they were doing, even if he didn't.
Who had he first heard the word dissociation from in regards to himself? Another thing that he couldn't remember. Before his injury, after his escape from the hospital while he was still walking toward Baltimore with the cuffs of his pants damp from snow, he'd taken inventory.
Sitting at Thanksgiving dinner with his family, his wife beside him. There was tension but no anger, not in that moment, but then his memory skipped like a record: she was already dead, and he hadn't a solid recollection of actually committing the act or what brought him to do so, but he was certain he had done it. He remembered killing the rest of them… or he thought he did, but he acknowledged he remembered these murders similarly to how he remembered the Chesapeake Ripper murders, which he hadn't committed. Apparently. As much as he could know it to be true, those memories had not yet entirely deprogramed. But a fabricated memory seeming genuine didn't take the reality away from the genuine, either. Dr. Chilton had taken advantage of these periods of dissociation and Gideon's thoughts were now entirely unreliable.
For now, they were. So for now all Abel Gideon could comfort himself with were probablys. Maybes. Probably nots. Not the Chesapeake Ripper but the Chesapeake Rip-off, but still the two of them overlapped unclearly in his mind. He thought that maybe could he actually speak with the real Chesapeake Ripper he could separate the him from not the way an archaeologist separates dirt from artifact.
He felt certain of nothing except that the two of them would meet again. Gideon had looked and not found, but he had also survived; the Chesapeake Ripper would come for him now, and he hoped that this too would ultimately prove a mercy.