Midnight. They call it 'the witching hour' because, according to the old wives' tale, only witches could possibly be up and about, inevitably doing secret and evil tasks. I call it my sacred time. When most of the world is alsleep and only night owls are stirring, I am awake, left to my thoughts. Outside my apartment, a last minute get together is stirring up drinks and philosphical conversation. I can hear them laughing and the chink of glasses and I smile to myself. Sometimes I envy those who are able to have loud, raucous parties and stay up until the wee hours of the morning, but only sometimes.

I'm in one of my moods again. I can't ever explain when these moments hit me. It's impossible to describe it. But I know when it happens. Like a lightning bolt on a sunny day, it strikes without any provocation. All I know is, when it hits me, I am forever changed. Sometimes the mood is instantaneous gloominess, other times when I am mired in melancholy the mood strikes me and I end up laughing without knowing exactly why. At first these sudden changes in mood bothered me. I always felt blindsided by the impact of what I felt and it often left me shattered and my days ruined. I was forced to accept these sudden changes and move on with my life.

When people look at me, they see it radiating from me, and they look at me as though they know what I feel. Their eyes reveal sympathy, empathy, everything I try to hide within myself.

Yet they know nothing. They know nothing of my pain, of my grief. It is mine, my singular anguish, my burden.

They are not there in the nights when I reach for them in my dreams and wake up when I do not feel them in my arms. They cannot comfort me when my tears flow. They cannot ease my ache for my family. They did not help me as I packed away their things. They were not there when I closed my eyes and saw them alive and breathing under their clothes. They could not soothe me when I inhaled their scent so that I could never forget it. They did not lock the door when I sold their house and left the memories we had made in it behind.

When he survived the crash, all the doctors and nurses at the hospital and the policemen and firemen who found him called him a "Miracle baby". As his aunt, I couldn't look at him like that, not when he was the only one to make out alive. I felt cheated by those people, those who couldn't see as a tragedy, how it wasn't a miracle that he lost his entire family in the space of 5 minutes. He was robbed of his parents and a sibling that adored him. Where is the miracle in that? When I thought of him growing up, I imagined him trying to make sense of what happened, of what his life might have been if the crash hadn't even happened. No, it wasn't a miracle. Not to me. To me, it was destroying innocent lives for reasons we'll never know or be able to comprehend.

Instead, everything he could ever want to know about his family has been recorded as best as I could and their mementos packed away. Instead, I have to be mother and father and sister and aunt all at once. He stopped talking after it happened, but I'm working with him to change that. So far we've moved to short sentences, but it's slow progress. He seems.. angry, at times, but at who and what we haven't been able to figure out. I have hope that he'll grow out of it, just like he will with the speaking. If it is anger, I know how he feels. I am angry, too, and this anger, this loss, it is what binds us beyond our blood.

I fear, though, that he will always be a loner, without anyone he will feel that he can talk to. Already he distances himself from me, and our visits to the hospital for his constant check-ups and surgeries to correct damage done in the accident are getting increasingly tense.

But I have hope.

In him, I see great things. It is within him that I feel the world is going to change for the better. If he can just allow himself to open himself up a little, to let people in, he will be loved, and loved dearly. It is with great hope that he will not allow his past to dominate his future.

Until that time, however, I, Mariko Chiba, will have sadness enough for us both. I will smile for him, and love him as my own, as I have since he was born, but I will never forget the tragedy that shaped my nephew's life. And perhaps one day, he might even be a King. -End- AN: This is a strange piece, when I reflect on it. I wrote this using a piece I had written while thinking of my older sister and how she must have felt, and still feel, when her husband died a few years ago. I personally wasn't close to him and neither really close to her, either, but his death shook up my entire family and even though I live in another country and wasn't there for the mourning process my family went through, I still had to find my own way of dealing with the loss. Anyway, I didn't really intend on turning this to a fan fiction piece, and yet, it's how it turned out - even if you don't really know it until the very end. I put Mariko's age at about her late 20's, early 30's.