Happy Halloween!
Here's five hundred words of first draft...

I got Doc Ferguson's text at thirteen-twenty-six but it was oh-five-thirty before I stopped by the medical centre. It'd been a long night. The usual shift-change drunks, plus some pushing and shoving between natives that no one wanted to explain. Not to the law anyhow. Okeanan taboos made for a lot of enforcement grey areas.

Then I'd seen Lea to her rooms. Either so I wouldn't be tempted, or so she could. It'd been a long, long night and I started suspecting my judgement was -- suspect, back when I bought the condoms. Two months ago.

The clinic's reception point was unmanned. Strolling straight into the treatment room, I never for a second considered Ferguson might not be there or that Micah would.

He sprawled, face down and shirtless, on the nearest of three surgical couches, and looked about as comfortable as Great Aunt Tamsin's big ginger tom taking a nap on the bird table. One ocean blue eye opened, pupil barely slitted in the unforgiving white light. Shoulder muscles tensed, the contraction rippling down to his buttocks, raising the soft bristles along his spine. Okeanan males were... built.

"Major Demar."

Last week it'd have been plain 'Major'. But we'd had a falling out.

"Micah." I wasn't going to play the same game.

He blinked, then looked past me. Ferguson. I turned, like I was still happy showing Micah my back.

The Doc bustled. He was dark as they come, lean, wiry, and silent, with a stage magician's trick of appearing from nowhere but the restless energy of a man with ninety-nine other things to do.

"Alec." He stayed where he was, and I still felt as if he'd rushed forward and hugged me. "Glad you could make it." There wasn't a hint of sarcasm. Ferguson grudged every minute of his day, but was never off duty when I needed him. If it took me eighteen hours to stop in, he assumed I'd been busy.

And I had. "You were cryptic."

His smile vanished. The company's text system was secure -- with better coverage and reliability than the interdepartmental comms -- but monitored for content, and the people doing that eavesdropping were only relatively trustworthy.

What Ferguson wanted me to know would either make for juicy gossip, or unsettling rumours. I never enjoyed cryptic.

Which was when I shouldn't have remembered Micah was in the room, even if he had got off the couch and stood himself a fraction beyond arm's length, yawning extravagantly. Not because my glancing over could be taken as mistrust, but because I was looking at him when Ferguson said, "I was hoping you'd bring Eolaeyai."

He could say her real name, well enough that a native wouldn't wince. I couldn't. I'd given up trying years back. Lea was the name on her paperwork, and if it was good enough for the company... It was good enough.

Only it wasn't. And I wasn't. And the long measuring looks she'd been giving Micah told me she'd worked that out.