A/N: We have reached the end of this story but I am working on a sequel. Don't expect to see it anytime soon though. Like I said in the summary, I'm not a very fast writer. Still not mine.
He had no idea how long he stared at the results on his screen before he became aware of his environment once again. Now he has some idea of how his father must have felt when he had told him that he was going to study Exobiology. For a few minutes, he'd thought that he'd be disowned on the spot. Later, when he chose to specialize in psychology with a minor in anthropology, it was met with more like a shrug from his father.
Nonetheless, this was big. Bigger than disappointing your father by not following in his footsteps. Bigger than defying what your race considered the only honorable choice of profession for a healthy young male. This might even have consequences for his entire race. To think he'd put his scanner in his office to see who lied and who told the truth, who was taking his meds and who was taking drugs. That seemed so frivolous and useless now.
However, one thing had become clear to him in his time lost in contemplation. He could not risk exposing the secret of Richard Castle to his people. All he needed was for some young warrior with more hubris than sense to come challenge Richard Castle with his Bat'leth. After Richard Castle killed him, his people's existence would be exposed to all of the humans and it would be too dangerous for him to remain on earth to continue his work.
The surgery he'd had endure to pass as human would all be for naught. All of the information he was gathering on this fascinating species would stop. This would go beyond any personal tragedy for himself, the humans of Earth becoming aware of his people prematurely could be a disaster. Certainly his people had more advanced technology but these humans showed incredible capacity to advance quickly. Despite their lack of focus on being warriors, they showed almost frightening abilities as wily and determined foes.
He didn't know how many of his kind were scattered among the stars now but he knew that the number of humans on earth vastly outnumbered the number of his kind on the main worlds of their empire. Despite their ferocity, humans were much more tolerant of being crowded with their own kind than were his own people. If his people populated this city of New York, about half of them would die in a day from all of fighting. No, he did not want humans as an enemy, he'd known that for years.
What he saw now in his scans of Richard Castle brought a whole new dimension to the possible threat of humans. Were there more like Richard Castle? He'd rarely ventured outside this city and he met only a handful of people compared to how many were in just this one city on this planet. Even if humans such as Richard Castle were rare, their abilities could make up for low numbers. A war with humans would not be glorious, it could be a blow that his people would struggle to recover from for generations.
How had humans come into contact with Changelings? He had no idea where their domain was but he knew it was impossibly far away with current technology. They only knew of the existence of the Changeling race because of the wormhole they had found but even that was far away. It had been a hard lesson for his people to guard that wormhole, not just to make sure the Changelings didn't insert themselves into this part of the galaxy but to keep the stupid young warriors from going through to provoke them. They'd probably learned a lot about his people from the bodies and ships that had been lost before wiser heads had prevailed.
Despite what he'd learned from his scans, he had no idea if Richard Castle was a first generation hybrid or if he'd inherited the alien DNA that was in every cell of his body. It had come out that he was an only child but was his mother or father a hybrid? Could this have all started before his race had discovered the wormhole?
It wasn't just that they'd had no idea that a Changeling could merge with another species like this. He also didn't understand why that would happen. All of what he knew about Changelings suggested that they had contempt for beings like himself and humans calling them "Solids" with derision. For one thing, they lost a lot of their abilities by doing this. Of course the hybrid had some interesting characteristics as well.
Richard Castle was not by any stretch of the imagination a normal human. His muscles and bones suggested greater strength and speed than any species that he was aware of. There were also strange changes to his sensory organs and similar changes within his nervous system as well. Was his nervous system itself now capable of direct perception? If so, of what? A chilling possibility occurred to him, could Richard Castle read minds?
Richard Castle had seemed distracted at first. Had he realized that the therapist they were seeing was not human? Had he somehow sensed that he was being scanned? Had he seen inside his mind? He hoped that Richard Castle did not consider him a threat. He'd deliberately not taken any weapons with him when he'd come to Earth so he'd be no match for him. Even if he'd had a disruptor with him, would he be able to use it quickly enough to kill the hybrid? He didn't know for sure but he didn't think the answer would be good for him.
He'd already decided that he needed more sessions with the female than with the hybrid and told them that. He'd have little opportunity to interact with Richard Castle and he now wasn't anxious to either. If he somehow provoked the hybrid, he'd be dead and his body falling into the hands of one of their coroners would not be something he cared to contemplate.
The fact that he had not objected to private meetings between him and his mate indicated that all was well for now or at least that he wasn't considered a threat. In fact there were some changes in his mate as well. Some of the odd fluids in Richard Castle's body also now existed in his mate's body although she had no capacity for producing them herself. He knew how that exchange of fluids must have happened but dared not think about it too much. He'd had to remain celibate for all his years on this planet as their females were too fragile for him to have sex with. This Kate Beckett might be the only human female capable of walking away from a session with him. He could not seriously consider that though as not only would she be unwilling, he definitely did not wish to anger Richard Castle. No, that wouldn't do at all.