[Alex's POV]
The walk home was by far the most awkward one Alex had experienced in his whole life. None of them had said a word after they'd left the park. All of them too caught up in their own thoughts. Alex, for one, felt like he was making a mistake by bringing Otto home and going with Mar.
But maybe Otto had been right. Maybe she'd seen something he hadn't. His explanation of how he'd gotten his hands on the Book of the Dead was certainly not the one he'd expected. So maybe he did deserve a chance to explain.
And if he was being really honest with himself, Alex really missed being close to his dad. It was nice to have someone who had your back, or who had a good guess of what was on your mind even before you told them.
Alex clicked the door closed behind him and looked at his father's back expectantly.
"Come on," Mar said awkwardly. "Let's whip up something quick to eat. I'm starving."
Alex agreed with a small nod. Leaving the field of Reeds caused more of a back-lash than he had anticipated. He suddenly felt glad for the coincidental arrival at night, as he was feeling properly exhausted. And so, Mar took some spaghetti sauce from the freezer, put it in the microwave and put some water in a pot to boil it.
"So…" Mar said when all the machines were busy. "What do you want to know first?"
Alex thought about it for an instant. What did he want to know first? He wasn't sure himself. But then his eye fell on the Book of the Dead.
"Tell me about my mother," he said. "Were you there when she bought the book?"
Mar, who'd looked at Alex like he'd asked the one thing he wasn't ready to answer, looked relieved again when he'd specified the question more.
"Your mother," he said and released a shaky breath. "I met her on one of my travels around the world. She had been looking at some ancient Mayan artifact, and when I asked her about it she gave me this look… I don't know… As if she'd been waiting for me. We've been inseparable ever since. She would always complained about how humans had a tendency to pollute everywhere they went, and she always seemed to know the better solution."
He doubted for a second before continuing.
"She had this affinity for powerful things. The book is just one example. Powerful objects, yet their power was invisible to the naked eye. It took me years to find a trustworthy method to measure the type of power she was talking about and it came with a handy advantage. All the objects she pointed out had the same energy wave signature, unique only to them. The book has it, the old oak tree in the park has it and you."
As he said the last words, he looked Alex straight in the eyes and Alex felt his heart skip a beat.
"You need to know that you were never a normal boy, Alex," he said so serious it almost made Alex blush for assuming he had been. "From the very first day you were born, I knew you were special."
Mar's gaze drifted of for a moment as he seemed to be remembering the day Alex was born and then continued: "Your mother had been saying that she had a surprise for me, but she wouldn't tell me what it was until we were back home."
A sad smile ghosted over Mar's face at the memory. He paused and swallowed.
"Sadly enough, she never got to reveal the secret herself. That day one of our experiments had gone horribly wrong, and I haven't seen her ever since."
"Wait," Alex interrupted Mar's explanation. "That doesn't make any sense. Thomas said she vanished the day I was born. What had you been working on that was so important that she would come to work the same day that she had given birth to me?"
Alex could see Mar's shoulders jolt while he was asking his question. He busied himself with stirring the spaghetti sauce and added pasta to the now boiling water. Alex waited patiently until Mar was ready to speak.
"That's just it," Mar said in a very quiet tone of voice. "She's never been pregnant. I remember searching high and low for a way to get her back, the day of the accident. Needless to say, without success. When I returned home very late that night, feeling very broken and useless, I stumbled into bed, only to find an egg a little larger than a football between the sheets. It felt warm and pulsed with life. I remember hugging it to my chest and crying myself to sleep."
"An egg?" Alex asked confused. "Then, where was I?"
"What do you think hatched from the egg? Hmm?" Mar asked, both his brows high in anticipation. Alex blinked surprise.
"Well, that would explain the wings," Alex thought to himself. Mar chuckled at his son's reaction.
"Didn't expect that, did you?" he laughed. "So yeah, if you ask why those sensors were everywhere… It started out as a way to keep you alive, really. It took me two years to get you to hatch from your egg. I had to develop a new type of incubator, which kept you warm by exposing you to large quantities of bright light. Don't think a little glass container in the sun would do the job. Oh no! That was too easy, it had to be an electricity devouring box."
Now it was Alex's turn to chuckle as Mar clearly remembered the difficulties at the time.
"When you finally did hatch, you looked and acted exactly like any other human baby."
This time, Mar's facial expression became tender as his arms gave off the impression of holding a little baby.
"You ate, pooped and slept like any other child. The only thing that was different about you, was the fact that your energy levels were ten times that of a normal human being."
Mar paused his explanation to drain the spaghetti and Alex took plates to set the table. The scene felt alien and familiar at the same time. It made shivers run up and down his spine.
"But if I was a normal baby, then why do I remember being in the hospital all the time?" Alex asked.
"Ah, that… was another accident that I couldn't prevent," Mar answered with great difficulty. "One day, I think you were about three years old, you just climbed on the windowsill and jumped out of the window, like a bird taking flight."
"Predictably, you fell," Mar said as he swallowed hard. "Thank God, there had been bushes underneath the window to break your fall, but you still had a bad concussion, and scrapes and bruises all over your body. The worst part was that you'd lost your will to live. And not just mentally. We constantly had to tie you to a heart-rate-monitor, because your heart would literally just stop beating."
Mar looked Alex in the eyes and hurriedly looked away again as a tear slid down his cheek. He wiped it away and scraped his throat.
"Thank God, those days are over," he mumbled and put a large fork of spaghetti into his mouth.
"So yeah," he said when he was finally done with chewing. "That's why there was measuring equipment everywhere. To keep track of you. As you grew, so did your energy-levels, but they weren't anything like what they are now. I'd been afraid of what puberty would do to you, but I'd never expected… this."
"That explains the measuring equipment, but why the listening devices?" Alex asked. Mar blushed bright red.
"They were convenient?" he asked, clearly ashamed of the fact now. "This way I knew what was bothering you even without you telling me. I know what a difficult teen I was, and I don't want the same things that happened to me, happen to you just because we were incapable of communicating."
"You know," Mar continued after a short pause. "What you were about to say earlier, right before Otto stopped you? I said the exact same thing to my father, right before I cut all ties with him. For a second, I was sure you'd do the same. I'm glad you didn't thought. I don't think I'd survive losing you too."
By this point Alex's fork was lying motionless in his plate. His eyes were burning and his bottom lip was trembling. His dad was right, that was exactly what he was about to do. He felt so stupid now that he'd listened to his dad's explanation.
He jumped in surprise when he felt something touch his hand and then noticed it was his dad who'd reached over the table to give his hand a little squeeze. A laugh escaped him when he noticed his dad was crying too, and realized that their expressions probably looked pretty similar once more.
"What happened to you then?" Alex asked once he'd found his voice again. Mar doubted.
"Your grandfather and I just never had a connection like you and I have," he finally said. "We disagreed on everything, to the point where I ran away and I've been hiding from him ever since."
"Does that mean that I still have a grandfather out there somewhere?" Alex asked surprised.
"You sure do," Mar laughed. "But, don't go looking for him. He is like no-one you've ever met before. Stuck in the past and strung on ancient customs. There's no saying what he'll do if he finds you."
Alex stared at Mar for an instant. He seemed genuinely afraid of the guy.
"OK, I won't," he said.
"So, that's about as much as I can explain to you right now. Is there something you'd like to share with me?"
Alex doubted.
"I'm sorry," he said after a while. "I guess I'm still afraid that you'll lock me up in a cage and conduct evil experiments on me if I do."
This time Mar looked severely hurt.
"I would never lock you up inside a cage!"
"So you're telling me Springfield wasn't a town owned by Bright inc.?" Alex asked, raising an eyebrow in challenge, daring him to prove him wrong.
"That wasn't a cage," Mar said, still sounding hurt. "It was a safety precaution. Do you have any idea how high your energy levels were when we left there? Do you have any idea how high they are now? What that amount of energy could cause when things go wrong?"
Alex immediately thought of the petrified mountains.
"Actually, I do have a pretty good idea of what would happen," Alex mumbled downhearted.
"You do?" Mar asked confused.
"Yeah, it's where I got the energy I have now. I undid a disaster-zone where things had gone wrong because the previous owner of these powers had lost control," he said, feeling like a stupid little child once more.
Mar gave him a flat stare.
"Let me get this straight," he said. "Not only were you conscious of the damage this amount of power can cause when you took it in, but you even knew that the energy was unstable enough for the previous owner to lose control?! Oh, Alex. I thought you were smarter than that."
"It's not unstable!" Alex complained and crossed his arms childishly. "And it's not like I had choice! I made the mess, so I have to fix it, right?"
"You made the mess?!" Mar asked incredulously. "You lost control of your own power?!"
"Not exactly," Alex said as he motioned for Mar to calm down. "That's kind of a long story and not exactly important right now. There's just one more thing I want to know."
Mar looked as if he was ready to complain, but curiosity got the better of him.
"Did mom have these?" Alex asked as he unfurled his wings. Judging by his dad's completely flabbergasted expression at the sight of his ginormous wings, she had either never shown hers to him or she didn't have any.
"What-?! Are those wings?" Mar asked after a few seconds of incredulousness.
"Jep," Alex said, a note of amusement to his voice. "Very real, and very attached to me. Thankfully, I can make them disappear again."
"Where did you get those?" Mar asked just as incredulous as the first time.
"That's just the thing," Alex said as he folded his wings away again, to vanish completely. "I think they've always been there. I simply never knew."
Mar stared at him for a full three seconds.
"Turn around, will you?" he finally broke the silence and so Alex obediently stood from his chair and turned around.
"Young man, are you pulling my leg?" Mar asked as he was feeling Alex's shoulders for remnants of the wings, but there weren't any.
"I most definitely am not," Alex said.
"Can you use them to fly?"
"Yes, I can. I even carried Otto earlier. They are very sturdy."
"Can you make me wings?"
"I can, but that's not the point. Dad, concentrate!" Alex said as he shrugged his shoulders free from Mar's hands.
"Sorry, my boy. You've made it very clear earlier that you don't want me to 'research' you anymore. So I'm picking up all that grains I can, you know? I'm just worried about you."
"I know. And I'm sorry," Alex said as he walked into his dad's open arms to hug him.
"Maybe I've been a little too hasty earlier," Alex mumbled into his dad's shoulder.
"You think?" Mar chuckled in return. "Does this mean I can monitor you again?"
"Yeah," Alex said reluctantly. "But the listening devices really have to go."
Mar chuckled.
"OK! OK! OK! I get it. Listening in on your conversations is wrong," he said dramatically. "But you have to tell me things, OK?"
"OK, I will."
"Will you put back all of the equipment that vanished into thin air?"
"Cheapskate," Alex mumbled under his breath.
"Cheapskate?!" Mar asked offended. "Young man, that's a few thousand dollars you made disappear! Don't make me take it from your savings."
"It's already back! Sheesh, so hasty with the threats!" Alex complained, but could feel himself grin from ear to ear.
"Y-you did?" Mar asked, clearly surprised. "It's that easy? You don't even have to concentrate or snap you fingers? That's quite some power you have there, but maybe you should give some visible indication so that us normal people can keep up, huh?"
"A visible indication?" Alex echoed his dad. "You mean like one of those loading icons you see on computers these days?"
He twirled his fingers in the air to create a little glowing and spinning circlet, just like the little annoying loading icon that was so popular on computers.
"Not so literal!" Mar complained. "But yes, in fact, that's exactly the kind of visual indication I'm looking for."
Alex laughed at the ridiculousness of it all, purposely creating a visual effect to let people know he was using magic. In his opinion, the more visual the magic was, the higher the chances at getting caught, but he understood too that his dad was having trouble to keep up.
So he decided to humor him for the time being.