They met again on Wednesday.
No formal planning. No explicit "date" designation. Just a text message from Rowan mentioning she'd be walking through McKinley Park after work, and Michael's response that he'd be in the area.
Coffee turned into a walk.
The progression felt natural. Unremarkable. Exactly what he'd intended when constructing this aspect of the cover.
But the absence of urgency felt unfamiliar.
Locke noticed immediately: no tactical stakes. No objectives beyond maintaining the relationship framework he'd established. No intelligence to gather, no angles to watch, no threats to assess.
Just time.
Time not spent preparing. Time not spent monitoring HYDRA's potential locations. Time that couldn't be justified as operationally necessary.
That made him restless.
They walked slowly through the park. Late afternoon sun filtered through oak trees that had been there longer than the city around them. Families occupied picnic areas. Joggers passed on worn trails. The ambient sound of civilian life continuing without awareness of the currents moving beneath it.
Rowan talked about the library.
Not strategically. Not because he'd asked. Just the natural flow of someone sharing their day.
A patron who'd returned the same book three times because he kept forgetting he'd already read it. The frustration of a digital catalog system that crashed during their busiest hours. A donation of historical photographs someone's grandmother had kept for sixty years.
Things that mattered only because they existed. Because they'd happened. Because they were part of the texture of her work.
Locke listened.
Not filtering for intelligence value. Not cataloging information that might become useful later.
Just listening.
He realized too late that he hadn't been performing. Hadn't been maintaining the careful distance between Michael Hayes and Damien Locke. Had just been present in the conversation without the internal translation that usually accompanied cover identity maintenance.
That scared him.
"Do you like what you do?" Rowan asked.
The question was casual. Not invasive. Just the kind of thing people asked when getting to know each other.
Locke hesitated.
Not because he lacked an answer—Michael Hayes had a complete employment history with appropriate emotional responses built in. He could describe the satisfaction of solving logistical problems, the frustration of bureaucratic inefficiency, the quiet pride of systems that worked because he'd designed them well.
He hesitated because none of those answers were true in the way she meant.
Michael Hayes might like logistics coordination.
Damien Locke didn't think about liking his work. It was just what he did. What he was built for. The question of preference had never been relevant.
"It's fine," he said after a moment. "Steady. Solves problems."
"That's not the same as liking it."
"No. I guess it's not."
Rowan glanced at him. Not probing. Just noticing.
"What do you do when you're not working?" she asked.
Another normal question. Another gap in the cover he should have anticipated.
Michael Hayes should have hobbies. Interests. The small accumulations of preference that defined people beyond their employment.
"I run sometimes," Locke said. True enough—physical conditioning was maintenance, not recreation, but it translated into civilian language easily. "Read. Nothing specific."
"Fiction or non-fiction?"
"Non-fiction mostly. History. Military strategy."
The last part slipped out before he could stop it. Too specific. Too revealing of actual interest rather than Michael Hayes' constructed preferences.
Rowan nodded. "Makes sense with the logistics background. Systems thinking."
She'd given him an explanation. A way to contextualize the slip within the cover.
He should have felt relief.
Instead, he felt the weight of her generosity. The way she'd smoothed over his mistake without acknowledging it as one.
They found a bench near the pond. Sat without discussion.
Silence settled between them.
Not uncomfortable. Not hostile. Just quiet.
No phones emerged. No scanning of exits. No tactical assessment of their surroundings beyond what his training made automatic.
Locke became aware of things he normally filtered out:
Ambient noise. Children's laughter from the playground. Ducks moving across the water. Wind moving through leaves overhead.
His breathing. Steady. Unlabored. No elevation despite the walk.
His shoulders. Not tense. Not prepared for immediate violence.
Just... there.
Presence arrived without permission.
The realization was immediate and unsettling: he wasn't performing right now. Wasn't maintaining cover. Wasn't managing the interaction strategically.
He was just sitting next to someone in a park.
Being almost normal.
"My family used to do this," Rowan said quietly.
Locke looked at her.
"Sunday afternoons," she continued. "My dad would take us to this park in Portland. We'd walk for hours. He'd point out trees, birds, whatever. My mom would bring a book and read on a bench while we explored."
She wasn't looking at him. Just watching the water.
"I didn't appreciate it then. Thought it was boring."
"And now?"
"Now I understand it was the only time he wasn't working. The only space where he wasn't trying to be anything except present."
The words settled heavily.
Locke felt the pull toward honesty. Not confession—he wouldn't tell her about Sarah, about Emily, about the family he'd sacrificed for distance and control.
But less absence. Less construction.
Just acknowledgment that he understood what she meant.
He stopped himself.
The discipline returned. The boundary reasserted itself between what could be shared and what had to remain contained.
But it returned slower than it should have.
That delay was the problem.
"Do you see your family often?" Rowan asked.
Still casual. Still non-probing. Just conversation.
"Not often," Locke said. "Work makes it difficult."
"That's hard."
"It's necessary."
Rowan turned slightly, studying him. "Necessary and hard aren't mutually exclusive."
The observation landed with more weight than she probably intended.
Locke had spent years categorizing things as necessary or unnecessary. Tactical or non-tactical. Useful or expendable. The framework didn't accommodate things that were both necessary and damaging. Both required and costly.
"No," he said quietly. "I guess they're not."
The admission felt dangerous.
Not because it revealed operational information. But because it revealed him. The part beneath Michael Hayes and before Damien Locke. The part that still existed despite every effort to excise it through discipline.
Time passed without structure.
They talked intermittently. Sat in silence. Watched the park move through its evening rhythms.
At some point, Locke recognized the sensation he'd been avoiding naming:
Not happiness. Not comfort.
Grounding.
The kind that removed distance. That dissolved the edges he maintained between himself and the world. That made presence feel like the default state instead of a strategic choice.
Combat sharpened him. Made every sense hyperaware, every decision calibrated for survival.
This softened him.
Made awareness diffuse instead of focused. Made decisions feel less urgent. Made the constant tactical assessment that kept him alive feel less necessary.
And that felt far more dangerous than any physical threat.
Because if he couldn't maintain the sharpness—the distance—the separation between what he did and who he was—
Then what remained when the mission ended?
What remained when Michael Hayes was no longer useful and Damien Locke had to return to the life he'd built on isolation?
Locke stood first.
"I should get back," he said. "Early morning tomorrow."
Not a lie. But not the whole truth either.
He needed to end this. Needed to reestablish the boundaries that had started eroding the moment he'd stopped performing and started just existing beside her.
Rowan nodded. "Yeah. I should head home too."
They walked back toward the park entrance together. The conversation resumed—lighter now, easier. Small observations about the city, plans for the weekend, the kind of comfortable exchange that came from repetition.
At the parking area, they separated.
"This was nice," Rowan said.
"It was."
"See you soon?"
"Yeah. I'll text you."
She smiled—genuine, unrehearsed—and walked toward her car.
Locke watched her go.
Then returned to the apartment alone.
---
The drive took twelve minutes.
Locke expected relief when he closed the apartment door behind him. Expected the familiar sensation of returning to operational space. The mental shift from Michael Hayes back to Damien Locke. The decompression that always followed sustained cover maintenance.
It didn't come.
No relief. No adrenaline crash. No need to decompress.
Just the quiet weight of having been there.
Not performing. Not hiding. Not managing variables.
Just existing.
The dissonance was immediate and alarming.
Locke moved to the window and looked out over Sacramento as evening settled into night. Streetlights activated. Traffic thinned. The city transitioned into its nocturnal rhythm.
He told himself this was just acclimation. Exposure normalizing the experience. The feeling would dull with repetition, like any other stimulus the mind learned to filter.
He categorized it as another variable to manage. Another element of the operation requiring conscious control.
But this one resisted classification.
Because it wasn't tactical. Wasn't operational. Wasn't something he could analyze and adjust and optimize.
It was just... present.
The way Rowan had been present. The way the park had felt inhabited instead of mapped. The way silence had been comfortable instead of strategic.
For the first time since arriving in Sacramento, the city didn't feel like terrain.
It felt inhabited.
Not by targets or threats or intelligence sources.
By people. Living their lives. Unaware of the currents beneath the surface. Unaware that the man who'd just walked through McKinley Park with their librarian had come to the city for reasons that had nothing to do with logistics or companionship or any of the normal things that brought people together.
The realization terrified him.
More than HYDRA. More than the mission. More than the possibility of violence or failure or discovery.
Because terrain could be cleared. Mapped. Controlled. Exited cleanly when objectives were complete.
People couldn't.
People left marks. Created connections. Generated obligations that didn't dissolve when you walked away.
And Damien Locke—who had survived by keeping distance from everything that mattered—had just experienced what it felt like to be almost normal.
Almost present.
Almost human.
Not Michael Hayes performing civilian routines.
Not the Ghost executing tactical operations.
Just... there. With someone. Without walls fully raised.
And he knew, with cold certainty, that if he let this continue—
If he allowed the grounding to deepen. If he permitted the boundaries to erode further. If he stopped fighting the pull toward less absence and more presence—
It would cost him something he wouldn't be able to recover.
Not his cover. Not his operational effectiveness.
Something deeper. Something that had kept him functional through decades of violence and isolation and the slow accumulation of choices that removed him further from anything resembling normal human connection.
The thing that let him walk away. That let him categorize people as variables. That let him build relationships as tools and discard them when they stopped being useful.
That thing was already fracturing.
And he didn't know how to stop it.
---
Locke stood at the window for an hour.
Sacramento continued below. Unaware. Unconcerned.
Sarah would arrive in two days. The college visit that would overlap with his insertion window. Another variable. Another complication.
The mission waited. The facility waited. HYDRA waited.
And somewhere in this city, embedded within civilian infrastructure, was the item marked with a geometric symbol he'd memorized but couldn't identify.
That was what mattered.
That was what he'd come here to do.
Not to sit in parks. Not to feel grounded. Not to experience what almost normal felt like.
He told himself that.
Repeated it internally until the words settled back into tactical framework.
But the weight remained.
The quiet, persistent weight of having been present.
Of having let someone see him—not all of him, not the dangerous parts—but enough.
Enough that the distance he relied on had shortened.
Enough that walking away would require effort instead of instinct.
Enough that he couldn't predict what would remain when this was over.
Locke turned from the window.
Returned to the desk where zoning maps and permit records waited.
Returned to work that had clear objectives and measurable outcomes.
Returned to what he understood.
But the grounding followed him.
Quiet. Persistent. Undeniable.
And far more dangerous than any enemy he'd ever faced.
Because you could kill enemies.
You could only lose yourself.