Son Of Riddle

Chapter seven - Apathy

James was walking through a dark forest. He wasn't sure which forest he was walking through or why, but he had a feeling in the pit of his stomach that made him feel like he needed to do something, urgently. He broke into a run, trying to find whatever he was supposed to do, frantically. Suddenly the feeling in the pit of his stomach changed. It felt like he was being ripped apart from the inside. Like he was being hunted and couldn't do anything to stop it. The feeling got worse and worse until he felt like he needed to curl up in a hole and cry. The very idea of this was absurd at the time, he just kept running and running from this invisible entity. Suddenly, the forest went pitch black and ice cold. He felt an overwhelming feeling of dread. Like all happiness was being torn away from him. A sense of loss. Hopelessness. The same overwhelming feeling that took over when the dementors took away his mother. He stopped running and looked around him. His training earlier in life and his snake eye allowed for him to see in the dark to some degree, but he saw nothing but black. He felt a vague sense of panic wash over him. He felt cold. Alone. He felt any ounce of happiness slowly seeping out of every pore of his body. He slowly crumpled to the ground in defeat. Feeling crushed. Destroyed. He accepted that this might be his time. He took a shaky breath in...

...and woke up in a cold sweat. Although these nightmares happened somewhat frequently in the library of time, outside of it they felt...so real. Too real.
He glanced outside and saw that it was still dark. He guessed it was about four or five in the morning. He laid back down and tried to fall back asleep like he had so many times before when he woke up from nightmares, but found he couldn't. He forgot how hard sleeping was outside of the Library of Time. He eventually gave up and started roaming around the house. He guessed the house elves were all either at another house or dead. James and his father had given them explicit permission to guard the house with every ounce of their power and the only protection this house got were the traps that he set up the day he disappeared.
After a while, James got bored of just roaming and made his way to the kitchen. The house wasn't completely empty so there might be a small chance of there being food...
There was none.
James sighed in defeat. Even if there was food, it would probably have expired by now anyways. He sat on the floor in front of the cupboards and resorted to getting lost in thought. He glanced at his injured hand and realized the peice of torn fabric wasn't really helping. It must have come loose in the middle of the night because it was completely soaked with blood. He got up and went to the nearest restroom in the house to wash the wound off and to see if he could find some gauze or something to wrap it in. He washed the wound off tenderly and realized it wasn't as bad as it looked. His tendons were, in fact, torn but he figured they would mostly heal in a few weeks. He scavenged the restroom to find anything better than flimsy, dirty cloth to wrap his hand in and he finally found some bandage wraps and cotton balls, as well as a small bottle of rubbing alcohol. Gauze would have worked better than cotton, but it would have to do for now. He cleaned it without a wince and tenderly wrapped it. He assumed there would be first aid somewhere in the house, assuming they hadn't taken it all when abandoning the house. James was always getting injured or maimed in someway or another. His training was always very intense. In modern terms, James was a trained assassin. Parts of his training was testing whether or not he could actually go through with killing someone. When Voldemort wanted someone dead, he would tell James to do it for him, only phrase it a small bit differently. He was essentially brainwashing James to think that murder was just a part of his training. That murder was okay. Although James was never taught that murder was wrong because he didn't see it as murder, there was still a part of him that wrenched with guilt every time he came back from a "training session" because he knew subconsciously that he had just ended an innocent person's life.
James cleaned up from cleaning his wound. He had learned the basics of first aid from his father's kinder death eaters and the house elves. The kind death eaters weren't very common because being kind was seen as a weakness and if you were weak, you were worthless, in his father's eyes, and were put to death as a cause if their alleged uselessness. James tried not to let himself get too attached to the death eaters.