Danny looked between All Might, Nezu, Aizawa, and Tsukauchi. He knew this day would come eventually, where he would have to out himself as the Ghost King, who's older than quirks themselves. But now that it was actually here, he had the all too familiar ball of anxiety making its home in the pit of his stomach.
"My name is Danny Fenton," he tells them. "And I've been dead for three hundred years."
A tense silence flooded the room as the three heroes in question looked at Tsukauchi. He stood there, slack jawed with his notepad at his side.
"He's telling the truth," he tells them.
Danny smiles at him in sympathy as he lets his rings wash over him and change him into his proper form.
Instead of a scrawny teenager, he was almost as tall as All Might and built like a brick house. his shoulders were broad, but not overwhelmingly so. He was wearing his usual kingly garb-a skin tight, black shirt with his logo emblazoned on his chest. Loose, baggy pants that were no doubt armored, and a pair of heavy white boots and durable white gloves to match. There was a crown made of ice floating above his head, and the cape that he wore had the animated night sky moving aimlessly in its folds.
His face was much older, too, though that could be attributed to the beard he had. It was clean and on the shorter side, but it no doubt only enhanced his age. Around his eyes were crows feet, and the tell tale signs of stress lining his face.
He was no doubt the Danny they had all come to love. The nose and jaw came to the same, sharp points, though a little more defined. He still rubbed the back of his neck, a nervous tick he's apparently had for three hundred years. And he still wore his heart on his sleeve.
He was worried. Resigned in a way that said he had been expecting their immediate disregard of his origins.
"I'm sorry for not coming clean," he told them. His voice was much more echo-y than it had been a few minutes ago, the strong, sturdiness of his voice bouncing off the walls eerily. "But I'm sure you wouldn't have even considered me had I not posed as a student."
"Problem child," Aizawa groaned, as he collapsed into the couch by Nezu's desk. Phantom smiled at him.
"I'm technically older than all of you combined. I think that title officially belongs to you, Aizawa."
He got a glare for his troubles, though it lacked any real heat.
"Getting back to business," Tsukauchi said. "Ghost or not, you killed All for One. That can't exactly go unpunished."
"It can if it's ghost business," Danny told him. "I'm not just some ghost, Detective. I'm the king. And All for One has cheated Death for too many years to simply let him walk. He should have died two hundred years ago."
"If he was such a problem why didn't you kill him sooner?" All Might asked. There was an edge to his voice that Danny placed immediately as aggressive, in a personal way.
That's right.
For Danny, it was easy to forget that ghosts were people once, too. He spent so much time with them, and their otherworldliness that it wasn't something that's been at the forefront of his mind. Not in a long time, anyway. And Toshinori Yagi had lost so much to All for One. Of course he would be hurt that Danny didn't do anything sooner.
"It's a horrible excuse, but it genuinely isn't my job, usually," he starts out. He sees All Might's anger flare up by the tension in his exhausted shouldered, but Danny goes on before he can say anything. "Usually Death takes care of the reaping. I take care of the souls when they've already passed. And those that are particularly nasty get consumed by Death personally. I don't know what kind of quirk he had, but All for One was somehow able to hide from them. Death came to me, and they asked me if I could figure out what the problem was."
"And they didn't realize he hadn't died sooner?" Tsukauchi asked.
"One very crafty, clever soul in a see of quadrillions. Calling it a needle in a haystack wouldn't even be close to a fair comparison. But, Yagi, if it's any consolation, Nana says hi."
All Might's expression was unreadable. He opened his mouth like he was going to say something, but there was the bob of his Adam's apple and he closed his mouth, preferring silence instead.
"So does that mean you know about One for All, then?" Tsukauchi asked him.
"It's hard not to, when you're friends with most of the past users," Danny shrugged. "Plus, any time All for One had a fight like this, we always got an influx of ghosts. I'm sure when I return to my domain I'll have my work cut out for me."
"If the number of ghosts spike like that why wasn't he noticed sooner?" Aizawa asked tiredly.
"Numbers spike all the time," Danny explains. "Large scale villain attacks happen every few years. Plus there's natural disasters that take thousands out every year. And beyond an overwhelming emotion, ghosts aren't exactly too keen on reliving how they died. They were people, too, once. We're not just some monster made up in the horror movies Kaminari likes to watch."
Aizawa snorts, and takes his answer in stride as he lets Nezu's couch swallow him further.
"So, what now?" Nezu asks. It's the first time he's spoken, though Danny hadn't forgotten that he was there. "How are we going to proceed, Your Highness?"
"Phantom is fine, Nezu," Danny said, waving off the title. "And, well. I'll need to head back to the Ghost Zone now. I can always claim I was from another dimension, or I can come out with the truth. Though I have a whole realm of people to protect. The less spotlight on them the better."
"And Class 1-A?" All Might asked.
"A few of them were already there," Danny answers. "I'm sure they saw and heard everything. Though, they're good kids. I'm sure telling them won't be an issue. After all of this, they deserve to know."
"We're setting up a dorm system," Nezu told them. "They're starting construction as we speak. So whenever they move in, you can tell them then. In the mean time, let's work out a statement for the press, yes?"
