He doesn't immediately respond to that. He just soaks in the tone, the determination, the kind of frayed solidity that comes when there's nothing else to hang onto. What it's like to love someone that much.

He knows.

"Then we'll make it work." He looks back at Dean again - Dean, burning like someone in the last grip of a ravaging fever - and does allow himself a smile, small and hard. "It's arrogant. It's sure it's won. That's why it won't."