Chapter Text
Danny had long since decided that it was easier for everyone to spend the majority of his time in the Ghost Zone.
He’d scrapped his way to graduating high school, and with him being eighteen, he’d found himself thrust onto the throne. Clockwork had been kind enough to act as King Regent until he made it to legal adulthood. He’d only wanted to go to post-secondary to become an astronaut, and since he became a King instead, well. Plans change.
What helped the decision to move had been the revelation that being the Ghost King meant people labeled him as the strongest ghost, and, therefore, sought him out more often. Danny couldn’t reasonably ask his friends, or Jazz, or the town to go through more ghost attacks just so he could stay. The thing that made him almost move back home, however, was the absolute nightmare of paperwork backlogged for millennia.
It took Danny two years’ worth of time just trying to sort through all of it. That was fully abusing Clockwork’s powers, and using Time Outs to shuffle through the paperwork, too. He was not afraid to use Clockwork’s desire for Danny to experience as much of his life as he could after the Dan-scenario.
What, he wanted to waste two years of his real half-life to sort paperwork?
For free?
Hell no.
Sometimes, Danny brought Dan’s thermos with him to sort paperwork. He called it community service, and Dan deserved every second of it.
By the time Danny was finished, he’d easily had to create entire rooms in his home in the Ghost Zone for each topic. The division was not as equal as he thought it would be, either. He’d figured it would be all government-type paperwork.
He was wrong. Or right.
It depended largely on whether or not a being considered the Infinite Realms' actual government to be a sole monarch that had been absent via containment for the strong majority of his rule, and whose subjects actively used as a complaints department alongside paperwork documenting all the usual things Danny figured government figureheads had to deal with.
There were five rooms dedicated solely to specific topics. In order of smallest room to largest room, Danny had:
A room for proposals. Turns out, the Infinite Realms, the reality of death and primordial chaos, hated change, or, rather, change that brought about rules. Danny wasn’t surprised that most were submissions from Walker.
Speaking of Walker, Danny also had to dedicate a room specifically to handle prison requests, especially requests for release. Half of them were complaints filed against Walker. It wasn’t surprising to Danny. Who did you complain to if the warden and self-imposed (and begrudgingly obliged) overseer of the judicial happenings of the Ghost Zone was the subject of the complaint? Danny, apparently. The other half were execution requests and supply requests. It was… a partial relief that Walker wasn’t actually ending his prisoners’ existence but horrifying that it was actually up to Danny.
A room for census paperwork and yearly inhabitant filings. Arguably the most normal of the mountain of paperwork. Danny chose not to acknowledge that in a realm of the dead, the census paperwork for thousands and thousands of years wasn’t even taking up the biggest room.
A room for concerns from the Infinite Realms' version of Homeland Security. Danny had no idea what more he could do that they couldn't do. Many of them were made in the past four years based on how he saw “Fenton” listed as the concern. The concerns regarding the GIW and Ecto-Acts appear in the most recent chunk of the paperwork, and Danny had no fucking clue how to handle that shit.
And finally, a room for John Constantine.
Danny had no idea who that was.
When he’d settled on the idea of moving, he had spent weeks deciding the perfect location in the Ghost Zone. Not too far from the portal, but close enough he could get there quickly, while also having some peace and quiet whenever he returned to his ghost-home were a must.
He’d found a lovely expanse in the frostier parts of the Zone that fit his requirements perfectly. Danny’s original home started as a regular two-story house with a basement lab, and an observatory tower attached so he could look out into the Realms at all the wonders and horrors via custom-created, frankenstein ghost-tech high-powered telescope. It was Danny’s baby.
Not that he’d had the time to enjoy it since making it.
He had to add a third floor just to act as an office just to store all the paperwork, even including the Ghost Zone’s penchant for Door-based pocket dimensions. He’d long discovered that paperwork was his own personal hell, and that was just sorting it all. He’d hadn’t touched any of it yet.
At least if the paperwork was already sitting for god knew how long, then it was probably fine to leave for longer.
Danny heaved a sigh as he hid in the observatory to play video games and enjoy the fact that he was done with high school. He passed out with his feet thrown over the arm of a big comfy plush chair and the ambient sounds of Doom on mobile, resting on the pause menu. He’d just needed a minute…
His eyes shot open at the sound of horrible banging coming from somewhere in his house. He flailed from his spot on the couch and planted face first into the plush black rug of the observatory. The horrible mocking of the grandfather clock in the corner, a very obnoxious gift, let Danny know it was the equivalent of being ass o’clock in the morning.
Or four am, but that was what people who liked mornings called it. Ass o'clock was more accurate.
“Can I get one fucking night?! One?! I just wanna sleep! I’m dead, I deserve it!” Danny screeched into the soft fibers as he pushed himself up with a groan.
He yanked his feet underneath him with a sigh and pocketed his phone on his way out of his observatory.
“Good news, if it was Skulker coming for tea and biscuits, I would have known by now. Downside? Could be Johnny or Kitty crying over breaking up. Wouldn't be the first time one of them bugs me at ass o’clock,” Danny grumbled to himself.
He threw open the door of his observatory and strolled into the living room.
“Alright, which asshole-” Danny started as he stomped down the small hall.
His living room was empty.
His couch still had the blanket Tucker had gotten him as a housewarming gift strewn all over the couch just as Danny left it with evidence of a video game marathon littered all over the floor. Nothing.
He rolled his eyes and moved onto the kitchen. He opened his mouth as he flicked the lights on, ready to scold Dani for raiding the fridge without even saying hi, but no one was there.
He squinted around the first floor before reluctantly shifting his eyes to the stairway. He let himself float up the steps and peak. The doors within the space were all closed, and no matter how much he held his breath as he threw open the doors, no one ever popped out yelling “Beware!”
He moved up to the third floor as he thought of popping down to the basement. He looked down the hallway of offices and paused. One of the doors that he never bothered closing was shut.
“Uhhh…”
Danny drifted over to the office and heaved to throw it open like the rooms in the floor below. It didn’t budge.
Danny let rings form around his middle and wash away his HAZMAT. He shoved his head through the doorway as he prepared to chew out whoever was on the other side.
The finally-neat room was a fucking disaster. Several of the filing cabinets had burst open near the door and forced it shut. Paper had piled against the doorway until just below the knob.
“What… the fuck?”
Danny just stared for a moment as he took in the messy piles of paper that weren't there prior.
“Okay… sure. Uh… tax… yeah, tax season…? Do ghosts have that?” Danny mumbled as he shook his head, “Four am in the morning tax season, yeah, yeah. Okay.”
He rolled back onto the balls of his feet and looked at the little sign he had next to every office.
John Constantine
“What the fuck?!”
“Who the fuck is Leviathan, and why did they, and a bunch of other fuckers using their name, file over five thousand separate fucking documents about John Constantine?!”