He IS a Concept not a Ghost.
At no point? Was he EVER human. He is, was, will always be... Time. Outside of it, around it, through every variation of it. Simply and Complexely... Time. How COULD he comprehend? What IS there to comprehend?
Giving a Concept human emotions? Would be cruel.
They would love. They would hurt. Mourn and suffer, regret and doubt, grow lonely.
What sick BASTARD would do that? CREATE that? An eternal Being, made to suffer eternally? No. Concepts do not, CAN NOT, understand. And it is cruel to ask them too.
Either love them as they are. Or leave them be. Know they may like you, but they will not miss you when you're gone. They can not. They SHOULD not. And if you care about them at all, you will pray that never changes.
Clockwork looks like us. Is affable enough. Polite. But don't mistake that for humanity. Because he is not human, and certainly no ghost. He never was. Death, after all, can not KILL Time itself. But even as you read this, as I write this, it does just so. Second by second. Killed.
And the Observants? They a ghosts. They would be Singular were they a Concept. Because you need no more then One, when you stand beyond a god. When you are an integral cog in the vast machine of Creation, limitless and forever. Until forever ends.
What purpose do these Observants serve?
Limiting his power? Controlling him? To what end? Keeping him from corruption?
A mortal falliblity. A ghostly flaw. One he is entirely incapable of possessing. You could no more bribe him then you could threaten the stars, cajole the sea. Pariah was a problem. They fixed it. The Observant are becoming a problem. He fixed it. Danny will one day be a problem... he fixed it.
Everything functioning as it should. Happening when it should. Arriving just when we need it.
It must be so cold, looking into Clockwork's eyes, and finally seeing. Understanding what looks back. There is no man there. There was never a man there. There is only the manifestation of Time itself. Slow and fast, cruel and kind, but unrelenting. Eternal.
Like speaking to a blackhole. Or a volcano. Entropy and end. The fall of empires and the beginning of new ones. So utterly intertwined with Death, with Life, that neither could function without him. He is eldritch. Pleasant. Masking his inhumanity very, very well.
I imagine it just... polite.
Or worse, he does like Danny. And oh, what a truely terrible thing that would be. To be liked, possibly even loved, by the god so cosmicly beyond compression as to be unknowable. To have an eldritch voyeur know your entire existence. Your every could have, would have, might have, and been. To have been ever so carefully nudged along, away from what you wanted and you dreamed, to become something more.
So that God would no longer be lonely.
Even though God can not feel alone.
All because he likes you. Felt, for the first time perhaps, the urge to keep one.
Out of countless of countless, incomprehensible numbers, just you. Only you. Were somehow decided as interesting. As his friend. So... he ruined your life. "Fixed thing" eons before you even existed. "Nudged" things, to get what he wanted. Because who could stop him and how could they even begin to try? He is Time. Deathless and undying. Killed and unkillable.
And we are friends, aren't we Danny? Why so upset?
It's not like they stayed dead.
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