Boredom

            There was a downside to being very smart. In all of his years, that was one thing Light Yagami was sure of, there was a definite down side to being so smart. There were the obvious things like people who would poke fun at him for getting yet another perfect score, but he simply brushed it off as jealousy. What else could it be? He found it stupid to make fun of someone who was simply smarter than you. A dirty look and a simple reminder that his father was the police chief seemed to be enough to deter those types of people. Not once had Light found himself dealing with those types of people with his fists despite how much some of them might have pushed.

            Then there were the types that seemed to think brilliant could literally rub off on them if they hung on his arm long enough. These type of people were the hardest to deal with because they would hang on him and shower him with compliments and that seemed like enough to keep them around, but Light found them increasingly irritating. Besides the fact that they invaded his personal space like there was no tomorrow, they seemed so deluded that his brilliance would somehow rub off on them. This was stupid, of course, so all he could do was ignore them.

            The worst part about being brilliant had to be the boredom. With everything easy or somewhat easy it made challenges few and far between so Light often found himself bored with everything and anything. This was the way things were, he had accepted the boredom that came with his brilliance and passed his afternoon, evenings, and night studying facts and other things that he already knew backwards and forwards. There was not much else to do, it was not like he really had any friends that he could go out with or a girlfriend to keep busy and the televisions shows made his head ache with their irrelevance.

            His mother would tell him that he should go out every now and then, but after so many years of the same conversation she more or less stopped asking. She seemed to accept the fact that he was not going to change any time soon. It was not that she had given up on her son, she simply seemed to think that he always wanted to be the best. He guessed this was not overly surprising, since keeping his grades consistent was important to him too for some reason he did not know. He wanted to become a great detective and to do get into school he needed to keep up his grades. One of the only times he had not found himself bored in the past was when he helped his father solve that case a year ago. That was a change, something different, but it was fleeting. The police force did not like to make it public that they needed a seventeen year olds help with solving a case.

            And Light could only think about how bored he was with everything as he stared down at the black notebook before him. It seemed normal enough except for the strange rules and everything else about it, but it was something different, something new, and he wanted to know more about it, if this “death note” was even real or just some sort of practical joke to throw off his cycle of boredom. Yet he could not take his mind from the boredom as he thought further back, further back to his childhood.

            Light knew he was smart starting as early as a small child. When everyone else was learning to count he could add, when everyone else was learning the alphabet he could read, and when he would go to classes as a small child he always found his mind wandering because there was nothing else to do; as far as back then he was bored. He remembered once when he was small, a teacher pulled him aside.

            “Light, you need to pay attention while I’m teaching.” She said, her voice was soft, but she seemed so tired. He remembered that her hair was too long and her nose was too short, one of those attributes that he could not make himself tolerate. He simply stared back at her before turning and walking away. What right did she have to tell him what to do? He didn’t need to pay attention. He knew all of this already so why bother to listen to it? He got a scolding for talking back to a teacher, but that only lasted until they figured out that he knew all of the things they were teaching. Then they stopped nagging and let him stare off into space whenever he wanted. It was just easier than trying to get him to pay attention.

            The same routine was getting boring too, now, so many years later. From the moment he wrote the first name down he knew that this was going to be the change, this was going to be the thing he had been waiting for all of these years, that moment that was going to be life alternating. Those first two names were a rush like nothing he had ever experienced before. There it was, the moment, the change that he was longing for. Light knew he was too smart for this world, too good for it, and now he had the power to change the world to how he pleased. This was it, this was it, he was sure of it, and he was going to change the world.

            He even had enough confidence in himself to keep himself moderately under control when that shinigami appeared. Granted he was expecting something that was frightening looking, but the Dahlia smile it seemed to have just seemed to add to the fact that the creature might have been laughing at him. Light found he did not care what this shinigami thought though, not when he found out that there was no real price for using the Death Note. That was the proof that he needed that this was the moment to relieve him from this life.

            “Then...one more thing. Why did you choose me?” He asked this shinigami who called himself Ryuk, who said they had some sort of bond.

            “Huh? Kuku, don’t be conceited. I only dropped the notebook. You think you were chosen? It just happened to fall there...and you just happened to find it... That’s why I put the explanation in the most popular language, English.” Ryuk replied, laughing slightly to himself. Conceited? What right did this thing have to call him conceited?

            “Then why did you drop it? Including an explanation like that, it can’t be an accident.” Light pushed.

            “Why...?” The shinigami sounded a little amused again, “Because I was bored.” Light felt a small twist in his stomach as he stared at this creature, the wheels in his head turning slightly at the sound of that word. This creature was bored? “This may sound strange coming from a shinigami but... I just didn’t feel alive... Being a shinigami these days is so boring. We’re either sleeping or gambling. You write a few human names in the Death Note and they laugh at you for working so hard. Killing guys in the human world from the shinigami world isn’t fun at all. Plus, writing shinigami names in the notebook doesn’t so anything. I figured it would be more fun down here.” The two of them fell silent for a moment as Ryuk flipped through the used pages in the notebook silently. Bored, this creature was bored, it seemed almost funny that he found himself having something in common with a thing that resembled a nightmare. “You sure have written down alotta names though.” He said, breaking the silence.

            “Me too...” Light agreed and the creature glanced up at him, giving him a strange look and he wanted to laugh a little, “I was bored too.” At that moment he knew that nothing was going to be same from now on. He finally found a cure to his boredom, he was finally going to start wanting to get up in the morning instead of sleeping the day away, he knew that this was the moment. I was bored too, was all he could think as he stared at Ryuk, at this death god, and at the notebook that would change his life.