Jackie and I spent six months in the sample side of the High Security Lab... a pain in the hiney, and for many weeks I was very unhappy about our choice to come back. But it was not surprising given the novelty of what had happened, and a couple of years later, I forgave my people for their suspicions.
As the news from the various human settlements collected, it turns out Jackie and I were not an isolated case. It seems that about one hundred people were taken during that first HX sweep of humanity. Of those hundred, Jackie and I were the only ones to return. We were very lucky.
Many of the rest must have worked out with the HX, because ten years later, the HX's Human Sweeps began in earnest. For the next three hundred years, when the HX got wind that there were humans on or near one of their ships, the humans were chased down and capture was attempted. There were even some HX-sponsored raids on human planetary settlements.
This caused a big problem between humans and their partners. Instead of being a blessing, having humans along became a curse. We adapted by becoming secretive... no one mentioned humans when chattering around the HX, except as a decoy technique.
And, it got even worse. With time, many humans did work for the HX, and thrived doing so. The ranks of "tamed" humans grew, and those tamed humans were pretty good at helping protect the HX from "wild" humans.
After three hundred years, the sweeps suddenly stopped. Why became clear a few years later: the HX had started breeding their own humans! We called these "domestic" humans, and when they escaped, "feral" humans. They were very different from us wild humans... but those are other stories. Our story is that Jackie and I got back, and we brought a big battery with us, so we were set for life, and more. And... not only did we got to know each other well, we found we liked each other a lot, so we used the reward to raise us a big family.
Now that's as happy an ending as you could ask for.
-- The End --