Really, it wasn't Anakin's fault. Not completely, at least. He was tired and sore after a whole day spent working in Dooku's workshop, and the deafening noise of the drills and hammers and automatic saws hadn't helped with his splitting migraine. There was so much pressure inside his head, Anakin feared he might go blind soon, or die altogether. Which did sound pretty good, all things considered.
The second he had gotten into his car, after saying goodbye to Fives, it had started raining. And not light drizzle either, the kind that made for a pleasant companion with its soft pitter-patter on the roof of his battered, old Fiat Panda. No, what Anakin was driving through was the closest thing to a hurricane that meteorologists couldn't actually classify as one.
And then, because he happened to be the luckiest guy in the world, Anakin had been forced to take an unfamiliar road to get back home. After all, he couldn't have possibly removed the lorry that had overturned in the middle of the highway with his non-existent telekinetic powers, could he?
Maybe, he should have tried to focus on the anger that boiled through his veins. So frustrated he was, Anakin was sure that, one way or the other, he would have eventually found a way to teleport himself back into his shitty apartment in his god-forsaken little town.
Yet, there he was, in the middle of fucking nowhere.
And really, with twenty-centimetres visibility, nobody could blame him for missing the huge street sign that usually glowed of its own light thanks to cars' headlights. It warned against picking up hitchhikers in the next stretch of road, as there was a vengeful ghost that inhabited the woods at the side of the street.
All Anakin saw was a smudged yellow blur that said something about hitchhikers, and what he assumed was that it wasn't uncommon for people to get lost there. Or for their cars to break down. Maybe there was some kind of shitty hostel hidden deep among the trees?
It was a possibility, and very unlikely for him to have seen the directions that were most certainly there. Not that he was particularly worried about something like that happening to him that night. Who would be stupid enough to leave the comfort of a dry anything just to ask a stranger to drop them off somewhere along the way?
For that reason, Anakin didn't even think about slamming the brakes when he saw something vaguely human-shaped in the middle of the road, waving what could have been arms. It was probably his eyes playing a trick on him, anyway.
Except, when the shape got within his visibility range and Anakin realized that it was indeed a person, it was already too late. Thankfully, he had been driving painfully slowly, so it didn't take long for the car to stop.
Of course, the stranger was knocked backwards.
"Cazzo!" Anakin yelled, slamming his hands on the steering wheel. While he was pretty sure he hadn't just murdered someone, he felt dread creep upon him, which made his heart beat wildly somewhere under his tongue. What if they were injured?
Anakin swore loudly: he had no idea where the nearest hospital was. And if they decided to press charges? He was a broke college student, which meant that he would have to sell his apartment to pay for damages. Would he end up homeless, since he was an orphan? Possibly. But maybe Rex would take him in? Even if seven people already lived in his house?
Hiding his face behind his hands, Anakin took a shaky breath, trying to calm himself down. He could worry about his life being over later, first he had to get out of his car and check on the poor devil he had almost run over.
Turning his head to the left, he felt the equivalent of his soul leave his body when his eyes met those of a very pale man looking at him through the windshield, face pressed to the glass. Startled, Anakin let out a colourful blasphemy in his mother's native language that, had she heard him, it would have earned him a slap on the back of his head.
"Ma porca di quella puttana," Anakin blurted out, bringing a hand close to his chest. "Are you okay?" he asked, instinctively waving his fingers up and down in front of his face before joining them into an inquisitive shape.
The man, for his part, simply smiled and pointed at him then at himself.
"Could you please give me a lift? I'm afraid the taxi I called an hour ago's done for," the man said, his voice muffled by the window and the pouring rain. To Anakin's ears though, he still sounded distinctively British. Or was it Scottish?
"Yeah! Hop on!" he replied, gesturing to him to come aboard. Inwardly, he cursed his own existence. Just when he thought that his evening couldn't get any worse, he had to come across the one idiot who had decided to take a stroll under the Great Deluge, getting lost in the process. Pinching the bridge of his nose, Anakin swallowed a grunt of pain. For some reason, his headache had just gotten a lot worse.
A memory of his mother rose unbidden. Long ago, she had said that being so angry all the time would ruin his health, eventually. Of course, life had picked that damned day to prove her right.
"Are you alright?" somebody asked. It was the stranger, who had quickly gotten inside Anakin's car and was now drenching the worn-down faux leather seats of his car. Distantly, Anakin remembered that he had gotten it all cleaned the week before, which only worsened his already sour mood.
"Yeah, don't worry," Anakin replied, starting the car. As usual, it came to life with a dying-whale-like noise. "Where do you need to go?"
In the heat of the moment, he forgot to ask the man his name and what happened to him, while also failing to notice that he was completely dry once again. Inexplicably so. Still, Anakin didn't miss just how gorgeous he was. He couldn't make out the exact shade of his hair or the colour of his eyes, but with a bone structure like that, Anakin wouldn't have been surprised to learn that he worked for a modelling agent.
"Nowhere, actually," the stranger supplied, his voice light and heavily accented. The way the vowels dragged would have sent a shiver down his spine, any other day. Now, though, together with how hard it was getting for Anakin to stay focused on the road ahead, it made it even harder to understand what the man had actually said.
"Ah, is it nearby? I'm supposed to get home before tomorrow morning, you know? School and everything," Anakin huffed, checking what time it was. Weird, he thought, when he noticed that his wristwatch had stopped at 19.30. "Do you have the time? My watch stopped."
To his right, the man chuckled and turned to look at him with what looked like a very pleased smile. "Of course, darling. It's time for you to meet your demise."
"Sounds fun, as long as you clean up afterwards you're free to do whatever you want, really," Anakin said and shrugged, reaching forward with a hand to turn on the radio. Might as well listen to some good music if he was about to get brutally murdered by one of those serial killers Ahsoka was so obsessed with.
(Little did Anakin know that, back in the nineties, the Mauler had killed his last victim right there: it had been a Scottish exchange student, who had stopped to help what he thought was a harmless hitchhiker. What Anakin also ignored was that, in the last twenty years, twelve people had gone missing in that stretch of dark road, only to be found at a later date scattered here and there.)
"You'd be doing me a favour, actually. Two months of near-slavery to pay my enrolment fees? Hard pass," he added, grimly. Sometimes, he really didn't know why he couldn't just stop giving a fuck altogether, move town, change his name, and start a new life from scratch.
When his possible future-murdered failed to add something to what he had just said, Anakin briefly glanced in his direction. "What?"
"A vengeful spirit just told you that it will claim your soul and this is how you react? Really?" the man asked, sounding halfway between confused and amused.
"Oh, so that's what you call yourselves nowadays?" Anakin said, disappointed. Whatever spark of excitement had briefly warmed his frozen-cold soul had died when understanding of who exactly he had picked up dawned on him.
"Excuse me?"
Anakin shrugged and ran a hand through his matted hair. "You know, prostitutes. Hookers, gentle-beings of the night. Vengeful spirit sounds kind of cool, and that soul claiming? Great metaphor for eating my face until I pass out."
"How dare you?" the man spat out, sounding absolutely horrified. At the same time, the Fiat headlights started to blink menacingly, threatening to leave Anakin to drive blind through a thunderstorm. Which would be the cherry on top of the cake, Anakin thought sadly and punched the dashboard a couple of times, gruntingly happily when his four-wheeled piece of junk stopped misbehaving.
"I mean, you're the one standing in the rain, at the side of the street, asking for passage to strangers," Anakin replied, gesturing vaguely at the darkness in front of him.
"I am a vengeful ghost, you dumb creature!" the man screamed, slapping one hand on his thigh. Looking to the side, Anakin saw that he looked positively outraged. "I haunt this road, claiming the lives of those idiotic enough to stop even when there's a huge street sign explicitly telling you not to."
Okay, Anakin realized, definitely not a hooker. Which allowed for only one other explanation.
"Man, you're good at your job. I just hope that whoever hired you to give me a fright, paid you well," Anakin replied, hoping to sound apologetic enough. "Just not in the mood tonight, I'm sorry. I can still give you my best impression of someone screaming like they're about to die, though. And then maybe I can leave you someplace warm?"
Abruptly, a bolt of lightning touched the ground a couple of metres to his left and, hadn't he reflexively clutched down on the steering wheel, Anakin wouldn't have been able to steer the car back into the right lane. Then, just to make reality even more painful to his senses, his radio decided to turn itself up to maximum volume, turning the cramped interior of his car into a torture chamber.
"E te pareva, cazzo," he muttered, turning the radio off with a punch. That was what happened when one was forced to pay for subpar education and, as a consequence, didn't have the money to fix their only means of transport. Dooku paid him just enough not to be sued, and God forbid Anakin brought his car to work to fix it himself, only asking to borrow some tools.
"Believe me now, Anakin?" the man sitting next to him purred, showing a row of perfect white teeth. Maybe the lighting had struck his car, rather than the street, because Anakin could swear that the other's eyes were glowing a faint yellow.
"You know what? Whatever, Casper. Just wait until I'm home and I've left instructions for my neighbour to feed my cat, then you can call dibs on my mortality. It's free real estate, as long as Satan doesn't file a complaint later," Anakin replied, too tired to argue.
Not that him being dead already was out of the equation. It kind of made sense: the whole exchange could be blamed on his few remaining neurons getting rid of the last neurotransmitters before shutting down forever. Maybe he had lost control of his Fiat, crashed into a tree, and was now bleeding out under the downpour.
That, or somebody had spiked his daily fifth cup of coffee.
"My name is Obi-Wan Kenobi, thank you very much," the figment of Anakin's imagination hissed. "Really, I could just kill you for your insolence, but you make such a sorry excuse for a human being that it would be a mercy. Haunting you for the rest of your miserable life sounds infinitely more entertaining than watching cars go by."
Despite himself, Anakin couldn't help but agree with him.
"Nice to meet you, Obi-Wan. I can't wait to introduce you to my therapist, Padmé's gonna love you," he said, smiling at the thought. He liked talking to her once a week and really, she should have been made a saint for being able to handle him and his infinite list of issues.
Then, a thought occurred to him.
"Wait, should I tell her to bring some salt and a Bible? Just in case you try to possess her. That would be very bad for business," Anakin asked, not expecting Obi-Wan to just drop his head into his hands, using them to muffle a frustrated groan.
"I am not a demon, Anakin, I cannot be exorcised," Obi-Wan replied, sounding as if he was regretting picking him as his designated victim. "But you'll probably be happy to know that I'm stuck with you until I decide that your time has come to die horribly. Our destinies are bound."
"Just when I had almost given up the hope of ever finding a roommate!" Anakin replied, excited. Whatever Fives must have put into his drink, it was doing wonders to his brain. All of a sudden, he wasn't so tired anymore, and couldn't wait to get to know his new personal hallucination before the drugs were finally flushed out of his system. "You know, talking to your cat gets kind of boring after a while, seeing as –"
"Let me guess, it doesn't talk back?" Obi-Wan said, rubbing his temples with his fingers. "And the answer is no, before you ask. I do not speak cat."
"Ah, bummer, because Artoo does chirp back, you know? But I'm not sure if he's simply calling me an idiot or he thinks we're having some kind of open-hearted conversation," he explained and shrugged, focusing back on the road. Thankfully, the storm seemed to be clearing itself out and the darkness was starting to morph back into reality again.
"Do you always talk so much?" Obi-Wan asked, falling back against the seat. Now that they were approaching a roundabout, lit up by a few streetlights, Anakin could see that his hair was a beautiful shade of dark copper. If he had to make a wild guess, Obi-Wan's eyes were blue.
"I will be the bane of your non-existence, if that's what you're asking."
Obi-Wan laughed at that, a deep, rich noise that burned through Anakin's body like molten gold.
"Considering the ten minutes I've just spent trying and failing to convince you that I'm dead and not a mere by-product of your insanity," he said, sighing deeply, before adding, "You just may, Anakin, you just may."
He couldn't be sure, but something told Anakin that his vengeful ghost kept smiling all the way back home.