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She was just a temp from Chiswick. That was it. She wasn’t special, not powerful, not connected, not clever, not important. The only vaguely abnormal thing that had happened to her was winning the lotto after her wedding.
Of course, none of that was exactly comforting as she watched that awful blade sink deep into Shaun Temple’s chest. He hissed at his attacker, orange light flickering just beneath the surface of his skin and Donna Temple-Noble gripped her only weapon—a pitifully dull pocket knife that her grandad had insisted she take with her because the United States was such a dangerous place—until her knuckles were white and her hands shaking from the pressure.
“Hey! You alright?” Shaun’s attacker—his murderer—had the gall to ask her as he all but shoved Shaun’s body off of the knife, letting him fall unceremoniously to the floor, still bleeding. The stranger was impossibly tall, making her feel tiny even at her above-average height of 5’7”. The bloodied knife was gripped in his right hand, held loosely in a reverse grip at his side as ruby droplets slowly dripped down and splashed onto the dark laminate flooring. Terrified out of her mind, but not willing to budge an inch, Donna scoffed at the stranger, sure that he’d shove that bloody knife into her next.
“Oh gee, I don’t know. Nothing screams ‘alright’ like watching your husband get stabbed in the chest by a raving lunatic!” she said scathingly, bringing the dull knife to chest level in what she hoped was a threatening gesture. “Get the hell out! I’m calling the police!”
“You—” The tall man seemed at a loss for words, confusion flickering over his face. He hesitated, glancing down at the body on the floor, and then back at Donna. His mouth moved, echoing her words—husband—as if questioning their meaning.
“Sammy!” Another voice—further away—rang out. Hurried footsteps echoed down the halls of the hotel until a new figure appeared in the doorway. This stranger was shorter than the first man, but he wore plaid and denim too. He didn’t have a knife, but a sawed off shotgun was held at the ready in his arms. Donna, feeling a new wave of panic, laughed loudly.
“Great! Just what I needed: another homicidal maniac. Let me guess, is there a convention in town? Or is this just an American thing? What next? A bald eagle is going to fly in with a tomahawk?”
“Is she—” The short one asked. His companion shrugged a little helplessly. The short one—who, as Donna studied him, had absolutely gorgeous eyes—huffed and pulled something from his pocket. A flask?
Before she could blink, the man had unscrewed the flask and, stepping way too close, flicked his wrist, dowsing her in… water? Sputtering, Donna elbowed the man’s neck and kicked him between the legs with all the strength she could muster. The man collapsed with a groan, curling in on himself on the floor and gasping for air. The gun fell out of his reach and Donna allowed herself the tiniest of smiles. It’d been a while since she’d had to kick a man in the nuts. There was something substantially satisfying about it.
“Dean?!” The first man—Sammy, she vaguely recalled—cried out, taking a step towards the fallen man. Donna leveled her knife towards him, her heartbeat racing in her ears.
“Not another step, mate. What the hell is wrong with you? What—Why did you—” Her eyes darted towards Shaun on the ground. He had fallen on his back, staring up at the ceiling of their hotel room with eyes that were already starting to glaze over. She took a shuddering breath, returning her attention to the gun-toting psychopaths.
“Okay, okay.” Sammy put his hands up in surrender, loosening his grip on the knife and letting it fall to the ground. Once it was down, he kicked it away, out of his reach. “Listen, this is going to sound insane—I know— but all the bad things your parents told you about are real. Ghosts, vampires, werewolves—it’s all real. This guy—”
“His name was Shaun Temple!” Donna interrupted angrily.
“It might have been—once! He was possessed, okay? What I just killed was a demon.”
“A demon,” Donna repeated evenly. “You expect me to believe that?”
“Yes. Demons, vampires, werewolves, all those things are real. My name is Sam, that’s my brother Dean. We—We hunt these things, the bad things. We’d been tracking this one for a while. It likes host-hopping, more than the others we’d seen, so we couldn’t risk it getting away.”
“Host-hopping?”
“Er—yeah. Going out of one body and into another.”
“Say I believe you. What then?”
“Well, usually, we just kind of leave. You forget this ever happened and go back to your life,” he summarized awkwardly.
Sam Winchester wasn’t used to this sort of thing. It was weird enough that a demon had been hanging around a non-demon this long without killing them, but this was the first paranormal victim that seemed to get saucy over the whole thing. Terrified, angry, panicked—those were the normal emotional reactions. This woman, whoever she was, just seemed peeved.
“Oh, is that it? You just go around killing people and you just get away with it?” she asked challengingly. Dean groaned on the floor again, trying to put a hand underneath him to prop himself up.
“Listen, lady. We’re probably the reason you’re alive right now, got it? The thing inside that guy was not human. It didn’t give a shit about you and was probably going to kill you the second it got bored of you hanging around. That’s what they are. So, why don’t you do us all a favor and—” Tired of listening to him talk, Donna, with a scowl on her face, kicked his arm out from under him and Dean fell to the floor again. “Dammit!”
“Shut it, bow-legs!” She returned her attention to Sam, eyeing him skeptically as she lowered her knife. “So you kill, cut, and run?”
“I mean, we help some people,” he offered lamely.
“Oh, yeah. The ones you don’t brutally murder, right?” Donna shot back. At that comment, Sam’s eyes grew dark and his mouth—which had been twisted into a sheepish half-smile—turned into a grimace.
“Yeah.”
Donna studied him just a bit closer, narrowing her eyes at the man. She raised the knife again with trepidation.
“You’re not an alien, are you?”
“What? Aliens aren’t real,” Sam scoffed. Donna raised an eyebrow.
“Haven’t been paying much attention to London lately, huh?” When neither men replied, she scoffed. “And Mum thought I was daft… So if you aren’t aliens, what are you?”
“People,” Sam said very quickly. Dean, finally recovered enough to get back to his feet, chuckled lowly as he moved a safe distance away from the violent ginger. “Normal, human, people. Just sort of average, to be honest.”
“So you guys hunt ghosts and demons and expect me to think you’re normal? Right. And I travel through time and space.” There was a pause as Donna faltered, rubbing her temple as she was hit by a wave of painful dizziness.
“We were sort of born into it. Our dad was a hunter, so we are too.”
“Family business. Smashing. Well…” The headache throbbed worse and she moaned, covering her eyes with one hand. “Bloody hell.”
“Are you alright?” Sam asked worriedly.
“Dude. She’s fine,” Dean cut in. “She’s not possessed, the demon’s dead, the job’s done. Now let’s go. We’ve got work to do.”
“I guess…”
“Wait—you guys are just leaving?” Donna asked.
“Yeah. Time to go. Get your stuff, Sammy. I’ll call Bobby and let him know. Meet at the car in five.”
“Yeah, sure.” Dean, shooting one more uncertain look to Donna, snatched his shotgun off of the floor and headed for the door, leaving without a care in the world. Sam smiled apologetically, pulling a piece of paper out of his pocket and scrawling something on it in the pen from the hotel’s bedside table. “Here. This is my phone number. If you’re stateside and anything like this happens, call.”
“Anything like this? You mean my husband being murdered?”
“I mean… Smelling sulfur, seeing ghosts, cold spots in a building, weird power fluctuations—our type of things. Things that are not normal. I wasn’t lying earlier. We do try to help. It just doesn’t always end happily for everyone.”
“That’s real incentive to call, thanks,” Donna said dryly. Sam shrugged. She suddenly chuckled humorlessly. “We were supposed to be on holiday, you know. Odd place to go, Middle of Nowhere, Massachusetts, but we figured some time away might be good.”
Sam was silent as Donna quietly reflected. After a long minutes, she sighed.
“Oh well… Get gone, then. Do what you do.”
“Um… If you could wait a few minutes before calling the police, I’d really appreciate it. Winchesters and police don’t really go well together…” An awkward glance towards Shaun Temple’s body was the only hint that Donna needed to know how true that statement was, assuming that ‘Winchester’ was the boys’ last name or something.
“I’ve gathered.”
“Thanks.”
After an unbelievably awkward pause, Sam Winchester followed after his brother, Dean, out of the hotel room and out of Donna Temple-Noble’s life.
There was something incredibly humiliating about coming home to London without Shaun. It was sobering, somehow, to accept everyone’s condolences. It was only then that she realized that she felt very little grief at Shaun’s passing. Sure, she had liked him well enough and he had always treated her well, but there was very little love in their relationship. They got on well enough, kept a nice enough flat, had nice enough friends, but that was all. Everything about their relationship, their history together, was just enough. Nothing ground-breaking or earth-shattering. Ever since they’d met in that stupid shop till the day that he died in a no-name American hotel, she’d been stagnant, boring, ordinary. Some part of her was happy to be average, but there was this nagging feeling that she could be better. She had to be better than this. She might have been just a temp from Chiswick, but she was the best bloody temp from Chiswick and that had to mean something to someone. But it didn’t, and she was left alone in that enough flat and her enough job and her enough life.
With the strangest sense of déjà vu, she became desperate to reclaim some sense of adventure in her life. She sold the flat, sold everything she couldn’t easily fit into a bag or leave at her mum’s, and hit the road. She’d try traveling again, like she did before… She couldn’t quite remember what it was that she did before meeting Shaun—trying to remember brought back that awful headache—but she tried.
There was too much world, though, and Donna couldn’t save all of it. Eventually, she found herself thinking of home, of being just enough again, but she couldn’t bear to go back. To go back to that existence—existence, because it wasn’t really life that she’d had in London—would kill her as surely as a knife into her heart.
A knife… Into her heart…
It wasn’t often that she allowed herself to think of them. Of that time in the hotel room, of Shaun’s death. She had told everyone—the police, her friends, her family, even Grandad—that it had happened when she was in the shower and that hadn't seen or heard anyone, but her head wouldn’t completely forget Sam and Dean Winchester. She couldn’t forget about demons and monsters and the people that had apparently dedicated their lives to fighting them.
Thinking of the brothers made her wish that she could be like that. Some part of her, a huge part, craved adventure and to feel like she was worth something. She wanted to save the world, to help people, and she didn’t care if she’d be stabbed or burned or killed by the adventure, because she’d die with the memories of mattering.
With heavy thoughts of the future, Donna Noble—she’d changed her name back two weeks after returning to London—booked a seat on the first flight stateside, leaving everything but a bag of clothes and a scrap of paper behind her.