He considers. But he doesn't have to, not for more than a minute or so. Because while he doesn't imagine that he knows Dean the way a brother could, the way blood knows blood... He knows Dean. Has seen him stripped, naked in more ways than one, helpless and weak with all his walls beaten down. Terror laid bare. A kind of intimacy that's too deep and too raw to really even be sexual.

And it's not just the eyes, the way the face had twisted. The cadence of the voice, the rhythm of the words. It's so much more than that, and now he understands that whatever the demon had been trying to make him believe, it was lying, and he had known it the instant it opened Dean's mouth to speak.

"It wasn't him." He pauses, teeth briefly closing on the inside of his cheek. "He's in there. He's fighting. But he's getting tired."