"This is incredible." Mary said, still awed.
"It really is." Karine agreed.
"There is more. Since then I also have that energy who seems to stir inside of me. I can run thirty miles and still feel fresh. I'm also stronger and faster than almost everybody. I can also heal fast, faster than I should be able to. It's like my whole body is buffed."
"Nathaniel, what you are saying is not possible." Mary said doubtfully.
"This whole situation is not possible and we are still here love. We knew from the get go that there was no logical explanation for what was happening with our son." Karine answered.
Looking at the doubtful expression on his mother's face, Nathaniel could only sigh. He then rose and started striping, taking off his sweater and T-shirt, showing his impressive 6 pack. His mothers were not understanding why he was doing that until they saw that Nathaniel's chest was sporting some impressive bruises.
"What happened?��� Mary cried, alarmed to see her son hurt like that.
"I got in close combat with one of the attackers, these guys were punching hard. Now see for yourself mom."
Nathaniel then began to gather his soul's power on his chest where he had been hit. He had become quite handy at doing it after getting injured repeatedly when doing parkour or when he was in rehab. At first, he needed five minutes to succeed in harnessing his soul to the part of his wound but now he only needed a few seconds. In front of the very eyes of his mothers, the purple bruises started to turn red and a few seconds later came back to unblemished pink.
Looking at the now perfectly healthy chest of theirs son, Karine and Mary were awestruck. What they had just witnessed was not supposed to exist in this world. Without saying anything, the two of them got up and started patting their son's chest. Nathaniel was watching them trying to figure out if it was real until he cleared his throat.
"Well, can you stop please? It's starting to get kind of weird." He laughed awkwardly.
Realizing what they were doing, they immediately stopped with a little smile. Even if what they had just seen and learned was mind blowing, their son was always shy and that didn't seem to have changed after his multiple transformations. They were already quite surprised to see that he was ripped, knowing he had always been kind of geeky when he was younger. They were aware of his morning run of course but his 6 pack showed that he was working out hard.
"Nobody else must know about this." Karine asserted once she came back to her senses.
"Yes, I understand now why you insist on keeping it a secret. If someone in the government were to know about it, they would do their utmost to study you or kill you." Mary said fearfully.
"Mom, I'm aware of almost a hundred classified missions carried out by the CIA in the last two decades. Each one enough already to warrant having a kill order issued against me. Trust me, I know better than anyone that I must keep quiet about this."
"Is it hard? To have the memories of so much killing in your head?"
"Yeah kind of. I'm now a conundrum. I'm still me with my sixteen years old body but I have more than five decades of life experiences in my head. In some aspects, I'm even older than grandpa. I'm not anymore the Nathaniel that you knew when I was twelve but I'm not Marc either, I'm becoming a mix of the two, trying to forge my own path with all that is happening around me."
"This is why you are meditating that much?" Mary understood.
"Yes, Meditation is helping me to fuse Marc's memories with mine but in general, it helps me understand myself better." Nathaniel explained.
Even today, he was still dedicating one hour each day to meditation. It was a huge help in understanding his inner self better and to notice things that he missed on some of Marcs souvenirs and generally about his day. He was starting to think that meditating had become essential in his life.
"Now I understand why you became more orderly and organized. We should thank military training for that." Karine said with a chuckle.
"I was always orderly and organized!" Nathaniel said indignantly.
"Do I have to remind you of the time when I found one of your school books in the washer?" Mary laughed.
"I have still no idea how it ended up there." Nathaniel grumbled in a half-voiced whisper.
"There was also the time he misplaced his shoes and we did not find them anywhere until three months after when we sold that horrible cabinet and they were on top of it."
"There was also the pineapple incident."
"Oh my god, I almost forget about that!" Mary howled in laughter.
"Alright! Okay I was maybe NOT the most organized kid in the world." He shouted, putting his hands up in a sign of surrender.
"I still have one question I want to ask. Why you? Why did Marc's soul come to you of all people?" Karine asked calmly once again.
"I looked into it but with Marc's record all deleted it was not that easy. So far, I found out that he and I only share one thing. We were both born December first at 16:24 albeit in different years. It is too specific to be a coincidence."
"You really think this is the reason?"
"I can't be sure, I'm not really an expert in these kinds of things. I don't think an expert even exists to explain reincarnation and soul power on this planet. That's one of the reasons I did not want to tell you about it. I'm not sure of anything at this point."
"We can understand now why you wanted to keep it a secret don't worry sweetie but we still have a hard question to ask. Do we tell your grandparents?" Mary asked with conflicted emotions.
"No, not yet at least. I don't want to worry them with it and we know how grandpa is. He will try to take steps to protect us. Steps that could send some alarm to the wrong people." He finally gave his opinion after thinking about it for a while.
"You are right about that, that really sounds like something he would do." Mary smiled sadly.
"I wanted to know something sweetie. Why did you refuse to go to the FBI building? Even if the agent in charge was out of line, you could have shown some willingness to help. That does not sound like you." She asked with one eyebrow raised.
"I could not risk having a gunpowder test be ordered on me." He sighed.
"Why could you not…." She started to ask before realizing why. "You used a gun tonight?"
"Yes, I did not have a choice. These guys were some bad ass killers. They killed everyone they met, I had to act."
"Did you have to kill?" Mary asked.
"Yes, I had to. They were too strong and too highly trained, if not for me they would have slaughtered civilians and cops."
"Are you alright sweetie?" Karine asked worriedly.
"I… I really don't know. At the moment, I just acted by instinct and training but now I have these confusing feelings in my head." He said, his voice cracking with emotions.
The next instant he was fiercely hugged by his two mothers and the emotions that he held until that moment finally started to spill out in the form of tears.