He had nowhere to go.

For the first time in a hundred years he had nowhere to go and no idea what to do next.

Maybe it wasn't one hundred years; maybe it was fifty or seventy. He had elements of a battery of memories detached and kinetic inside his head but any attempt to isolate and identify them had always been burned out of him.

But only the attempts had been burned; not the elements. They still floated free inside his head. That's how they never had to teach him to kill each time.

So now he needed somewhere to go. Somewhere no extraction team would find him. Somewhere he could find clothes that would let him blend in, disappear, so nothing could be burned out of him again.

So no one could be burned out of him again, he thought as he turned in the safety of distance and camouflage and watched the overly large response team converge on the motionless body farther down the bank of the river.

You're my friend…you've known me your whole life…

He didn't know what that meant. His whole life. Whenever he opened his eyes, the world had moved on without him and a new grouping of people confronted him. He wasn't a friend. He was a weapon, an assassin, an attack dog. A rabid dog. He didn't remember anyone ever calling him a friend.

No one except the man who - once his own mission was over - had offered no defense of himself, had been willing to die rather than abandon him.

Something churned up from his guts into the back of his throat thinking that, hearing that word in his head, abandoned.

He didn't want to be abandoned anymore.

He stayed in the camouflage of the trees until nightfall, watching from where he knew he wouldn't be detected as the other man was prepped and packaged and airlifted to safety and medical care. To family and friends and people happy to see him.

He stayed in the trees into the darkness until he found the strength to reach into his memory and pluck a floating memory back into existence.

He remembered somewhere he could go.

Shadows muted his movements from the river, through the city, to the apartment building of the man he'd pulled from the river. The man who was in the hospital now. He followed the shadows up to the ledge that led him to the window that let him into the apartment.

tbc