only gamble with birth control

The motel room smelled like old coffee and gun oil, and Dean had the map spread across the bedspread with three empty beer cans anchoring the corners so it wouldn't curl up on itself.

You sat cross legged near the headboard with a stack of lore books balanced against your knee, and you had been circling the same paragraph about crossroads demons and territorial disputes for the last twenty minutes without actually absorbing a word of it. Your stomach had been doing slow, nervous flips since Sam had asked you to come along on this one.

"You're gonna wear a hole through that page," Dean said without looking up, tapping his pen against a spot on the map that you assumed marked the abandoned grain silo where three farmhands had gone missing over the past month.

"Relax, sweetheart, we're not sending you in solo."

"I know that," you said, and you did know that, logically, but knowing something logically had never once stopped your body from being an idiot about it.

You had spent the better part of two years being the researcher, the one who dug through county records and dusty occult texts and translated Latin incantations at three in the morning while Sam and Dean did the actual dangerous part of the job. You were good at that part. You trusted your own instincts when it came to books and patterns and knowing exactly which page of which grimoire held the answer they needed.

Standing in an open field with a demon-killing knife in your hand, waiting to see if you could actually use it when it counted, was an entirely different kind of test, and you weren't sure yet whether you would pass it.

Sam noticed the way your knee had started bouncing before you did. He crossed the room and settled onto the mattress beside you, close enough that his shoulder pressed warm against yours, and he reached over to gently pull the book out of your hands and set it aside on the nightstand.

"Hey," he said, low enough that it felt like it was just for you even with Dean five feet away.

"You're gonna be fine. You've trained for this. You know the ritual, you know the weak points, and you're not gonna be more than fifteen feet from either of us the entire time."

"I know," you said again, and this time you let yourself lean into him a little, let his hand find yours and give it a squeeze.

"I just don't want to be the reason something goes wrong out there."

"You won't be," Sam said, and there was no hesitation in it at all, just that steady certainty that had always made you believe him even when you weren't sure you believed yourself.

"The only reason we asked you to come is because this demon's smart, and smart demons like to split their targets up and pick them off one at a time. Three of us watching each other's backs is safer than two. That's it. That's the whole reason."

He pressed a kiss to your temple, quick and easy, the kind of gesture that had become so natural between you that you barely noticed it happening anymore except for the small warm bloom it always left behind.

"Besides, I've seen you put a stake through a vamp's heart from twenty feet with a crossbow you'd never touched before that week. You've got good instincts. Trust them."

Dean cleared his throat loudly from across the room, not quite hiding a smile. "As riveting as watching you two make heart eyes at each other is, we've got a demon possessing a rotating cast of grain silo employees, and sundown's in about two hours. Can we focus?"

You laughed despite the nerves still sitting heavy in your chest, and Sam squeezed your hand one more time before letting go and reaching for his own duffel bag. The three of you spent the next hour going over the plan in detail: the devil's trap chalked out in advance on a section of the silo's concrete floor, the exorcism ritual you had memorized cold months ago, the salt lines and the holy water and the demon knife that Dean insisted you carry even though you'd protested that you were mostly there for the ritual work.

By the time you loaded into the Impala and headed out toward the edge of town, the sun was already beginning its slow slide toward the horizon, painting the empty fields in long orange light, and your nerves had settled into something more like focus.

The silo itself was exactly as unsettling as you had expected it to be, a rusted metal husk rising up out of overgrown grass with one door hanging crooked on its hinges and a smell of rot and something sourer underneath drifting out from the darkness inside. Dean went in first, flashlight sweeping the interior, with Sam close behind him and you bringing up the rear with your own light and the demon knife gripped a little too tightly in your free hand. The devil's trap was already chalked onto the floor near the center of the space, drawn earlier that afternoon while the silo's current occupant was elsewhere, and the plan was simple enough on paper: lure the demon inside, get it trapped, and you would read the exorcism while Sam and Dean kept watch for anything the demon might try to throw at you in the meantime.

For the first ten minutes, the plan held together beautifully. You heard the demon before you saw it, a low guttural laugh that echoed strangely off the metal walls, and then it came stalking out of the shadows wearing the body of a heavyset man in overalls, its eyes flashing black in the beam of Dean's flashlight.

Sam stepped forward immediately, putting himself slightly ahead of you, and Dean circled wide to try to herd the thing toward the trap. The demon snarled something in a language you didn't recognize and lunged at Dean, and that was when everything fell apart at once.

A second demon came out of nowhere, dropping down from the rafters above where it had apparently been waiting the entire time, and it slammed into you with enough force to knock the knife clean out of your hand and send you skidding across the concrete floor into the darkness of a side corridor you hadn't even known was there. You heard Sam shout your name, heard the scrape of Dean's boots as he spun toward the sound, but the impact had knocked the wind out of you and by the time you managed to drag air back into your lungs, a heavy metal door had swung shut between you and the two of them, cutting off their flashlight beams and leaving you alone in the pitch black with something that was decidedly not human closing in.

"Well, well," the demon said, and its voice seemed to come from everywhere in the darkness at once, low and amused in a way that made your skin crawl.

"The little researcher. I've been wondering what you'd taste like scared."

You scrambled backward across the floor, your hand searching desperately for the knife you'd dropped, but your fingers found only cold concrete and loose gravel. The demon's footsteps circled somewhere close, unhurried, savoring the fact that it had you cornered and alone, and every instinct you had screamed at you to run even though you had no idea which direction led back to Sam and Dean.

You pressed yourself against a wall of rusted metal, your breath coming fast and shallow, and you tried to remember everything you had ever read about demons, every weakness, every trick, but your mind had gone frustratingly, terrifyingly blank.

The demon found you a moment later, closing a cold hand around your throat and lifting you half off the ground with a strength that no human body should have possessed, and you clawed uselessly at its wrist as your vision began to blur at the edges from the lack of air, your legs flailing in the air. It was saying something else, something mocking about how Sam and Dean would find you too late, but you barely registered the words over the roaring in your own ears. Just as the darkness at the edges of your sight began to swallow everything else, a burst of light exploded through the corridor and the demon shrieked, released you, and you dropped hard onto the concrete floor while somewhere above you, Latin words rang out in Dean's rough voice and black smoke poured out of the possessed man's mouth and vanished into the ground with a final furious howl.

"I've got her, go! Dean finish the other one," Sam's voice said, closer than you expected, and then his hands were on you, careful and shaking slightly despite how steady he was trying to sound, checking your throat and your face and your arms for injuries even as he pulled you up into his lap.

Dean's footsteps retreated back down the corridor toward wherever the fight with the second demon was still winding down, and then it was just you and Sam in the dim spill of his flashlight, and the moment your front hit his chest and his arms wrapped fully around you, something inside you that had been holding on by sheer force of will finally broke apart.

Your breath started coming in short, ragged gasps that didn't seem to actually fill your lungs no matter how hard you tried, and your hands began to shake so badly that you couldn't even grip the front of Sam's jacket the way you wanted to. The edges of your vision swam again, this time not from lack of oxygen but from pure overwhelming panic, and distantly you were aware of tears streaking down your face and your own voice making small broken sounds you didn't recognize as yours.

You slumped hard against Sam's chest, your whole body trembling, and for one disorienting moment you genuinely could not tell whether you were still in danger or whether the danger had actually passed.

Dean appeared at the mouth of the corridor a few seconds later, having finished the exorcism on the second demon, and he took one look at you shaking apart in Sam's arms and immediately stopped in his tracks. "Hey, is she—"

"She's okay, she's just panicking, give us a minute," Sam said over his shoulder, his voice pitched low and even despite the worry etched across his face, and Dean nodded once, understanding immediately, and backed quietly out of the corridor to give the two of you space, murmuring something about checking the perimeter that you barely registered.

"Okay, baby, I need you to listen to my voice, can you do that for me?" Sam said, shifting you so you were facing him more directly, one big hand cradling the back of your head while the other rubbed slow steady circles against your back.

Your breath was still coming too fast, too shallow, and you shook your head against his chest because you couldn't imagine being able to focus on anything right now, but Sam just kept talking, patient and unhurried, like he had all the time in the world and nowhere else he needed to be.

"I know it feels like you can't breathe right now, but you can, I promise you can, you're just gonna have to trust me for a second. We're gonna do the five senses thing, okay? The one we practiced. Can you try that with me?"

You managed a small, jerky nod against his shoulder, and Sam pressed a kiss to the top of your head before continuing, his voice never wavering from that same gentle, grounding rhythm.

"Good, that's so good, love. Okay, first thing, I need you to tell me five things you can see. Doesn't matter how small, just look around and tell me."

"Y-your jacket," you managed, the words coming out broken and thin, but Sam squeezed you gently in encouragement and you forced yourself to keep going, forced your eyes to actually focus on the dim shapes around you instead of staring blankly into nothing.

"The, um, the flashlight. The wall. Your hands. Dean's boot prints in the dust."

"Perfect, you're doing perfect," Sam murmured, and you could feel the words rumble through his chest as much as hear them, and something about that dual sensation, feeling his voice as much as hearing it, helped anchor you just slightly more firmly into your own body.

"Now four things you can hear."

You concentrated, forcing your racing thoughts to slow down enough to actually process the world around you instead of the panic still clawing at your ribs.

"Your heartbeat," you said first, because you were pressed so close against his chest that it was impossible to miss, steady and strong beat even though you knew he had to be worried sick underneath that calm exterior.

"My own breathing. Wind outside. Dean, somewhere, moving stuff around."

"There you go," Sam said softly, and you felt him press another kiss to your hair, lingering this time.

"Three things you can touch."

"Your jacket," you said again, your fingers finally finding enough coordination to actually curl into the fabric the way you'd wanted to earlier. "The floor. Your hand on my back."

"Two things you can smell," Sam prompted, and his voice had softened even further, gone almost tender in a way that made your chest ache with how much you loved him even in the middle of falling apart.

You breathed in, actually breathed in this time instead of just gasping, and found that your lungs cooperated slightly better than they had a few minutes ago.

"Gun oil," you said. "And you. Whatever soap you use."

Sam laughed quietly at that, a small huff of air that you felt more than heard, and the sound of it, so warm and so achingly familiar, loosened something further in your chest.

"Okay, love, last one," he said, pulling back just enough to look down at your face, his hazel eyes soft with a mixture of concern and something deeper that always made you feel steadier just from being on the receiving end of it.

"One thing you can taste."

You opened your mouth to answer, to say something about the metallic tang of adrenaline still coating your tongue or the dust from the silo floor, but before you could get a single word out, Sam leaned down and kissed you instead, slow and careful and unbearably gentle, one hand coming up to cradle your jaw like you were something precious he was terrified of breaking.

It wasn't a kiss meant to spark anything urgent or heated; it was steadying, deliberate, the kind of kiss meant to pull you fully back into your own body and remind you exactly where you were and who was holding you. When he finally pulled back, just far enough to rest his forehead against yours, your breathing had evened out almost completely, and the trembling in your hands had settled into something much more manageable.

"There she is," Sam whispered, brushing his thumb along your cheekbone to wipe away the last of the tear tracks there, and the fondness in his voice made your throat tighten all over again, though this time for entirely different reasons.

"You did so good, sweetheart. You're okay. You're safe. I've got you."

"That's cheating," you said weakly, your voice still a little rough but steadier now, more like yourself. "The taste one isn't supposed to involve you kissing me."

"Sue me," Sam said, and the small crooked smile that pulled at his mouth made your own lips twitch upward despite everything. "Figured it'd work better than making you lick the floor."

You laughed then, a real laugh even if it came out watery and a little hiccupped, and Sam gathered you in closer against his chest, tucking your head under his chin and just holding you there while your heartbeat slowly returned to something resembling normal.

"I was so scared," you admitted quietly into the fabric of his jacket, the confession feeling easier to make now that the worst of the panic had passed. "I couldn't find the knife, and it had me by the throat, and I thought—"

"I know," Sam said, and his arms tightened around you, just enough to let you feel how much the thought of nearly losing you had shaken him too, even though his voice stayed calm for your sake.

"I know, baby. But you're here. You're okay. Dean and I got to you in time, and that's what matters. You didn't do anything wrong out there. That demon splitting the group up wasn't something you could've predicted or prevented, that's just how smart ones like to fight."

Dean's voice carried faintly from somewhere down the corridor, deliberately loud enough to announce his approach without actually interrupting.

"Everybody decent? I've got the car running and I would very much like to leave this creepy murder silo before something else drops out of the rafters."

"We're good," Sam called back, though he made no immediate move to actually let go of you, and you found you didn't particularly want him to either. He helped you to your feet a moment later, one arm staying wrapped securely around your waist as you both made your way back through the silo toward the exit, and when Dean caught sight of you walking under your own power, color back in your face, he visibly relaxed in a way he clearly hoped wasn't as obvious as it was.

"Nice going back there, by the way," Dean said as you climbed into the Impala's back seat, sliding in close beside Sam out of habit more than necessity now that the danger had passed.

"Once you got your bearings you actually landed a decent kick on that thing's meatsuit before Sam and I got the door open. Didn't know you had it in you."

"I panicked and flailed, Dean, that's not the same as landing a kick," you said, though the small swell of pride at his words was hard to entirely suppress.

"Panicked flailing that connects still counts as offense in my book," Dean said with a grin, glancing at you in the rearview mirror before pulling the car out onto the dark highway.

"You did good tonight, kid. Seriously."

Sam's hand found yours in the space between you on the seat, lacing your fingers together with the same steady warmth that had carried you through the worst of the last hour, and he pressed a soft kiss to your temple as the silo disappeared into darkness behind you.

"You did great," he echoed quietly, just for you this time. "And for the record, love, next time we're not splitting up. I don't care how smart the demon is."