Warnings: Swearing

Chapter 6: Every night

Dean had lost the ability to think or listen to the word "hospital". The phone was shaking in his hand as though it wanted to live its life away from him.

"Excuse me, I'm... I.. hem.." He stammered, his mind blurred and white.

It was late in the night, he was tired, the sweat soaking his shirt after the show was cool on his back and soon he would start shivering despite the heating of the tourbus. He knew they were watching him, Charlie and Sam with a worried look, and Kevin seated next to him on his bunk, who gently reached out to take his phone before getting up. He was one of those people who can call only while pacing.

"Excuse me." He said with a professional voice that Dean had never heard him. "Mr. Winchester is currently not in a condition to listen to you, therefore I will take the information for him if you please?"

Charlie refrained from giggling, seeing Sam silently repeat his "if you please" by articulating exaggeratedly. Kevin swept them out of his perception field with an annoyed movement of the hand and slipped between the seat and the little table of the tourbus, grabbing a pen that was lying there and made another gesture for someone to hand him paper. He noted an address, a few numbers, thanked the person on the line and hung up. Dean had not raised his head when Kevin began to tap away something on Sam's laptop. It seemed to him that the world had stopped turning. This was only a bad dream he was going to wake up from. He was looking for the flaw in the dream, the improbable detail element that would rule in his favor. But the reality was still the same. He would have hold on anything, the slightest change in Sam's piercing, the slightest change in Charlie's hair, at the slightest defect in the folds of the blanket on which he was sitting. Anything to reassure himself and tell himself that he was dreaming, that he would wake up and bang his head against Charlie's bunk like every fucking time. And like every fucking time he would hear her grunt and turn over above him. None of this happen, and Kevin handed him his phone which had just beep twice.

"You're leaving in two hours. Your plane back tomorrow is at one o'clock. Tickets are on the phone."

Sam and Charlie were watching them without understand. Dean nodded and began to look in the closet for something to change himself. By the time he turned back, Kevin was helding his bag in one hand and his passport in the other. Dean hugged him briefly before rushing off the bus, leaving him to explain the situation to the others.

The famous phrase said that you never know how much you love something until it's gone. Dean had believed that he knew how much he loved Castiel. He had sincerely believed it. But in the taxi that took him to the Texas airport, in the plane that took him back to California, in the corridors of the hospital, he realized that he had been wrong. Incredibly wrong.

He wouldn't have thought it possible to retain as much breath, as if that would change anything! Like a child's play, a bet against fate. "If I can hold my breath until the traffic light, he'll be fine", "If I get down the hall without breathing everything will be fine". It was stupid but he had no other way to reassure himself. He clenched his hand in his pocket, on his phone which kept vibrating and which he refused to answer before he had seen Castiel. Before the terror that was clawing its way between his ribs had ceased to want to tear his heart to shreds. Or had succeeded.

The day had barely rise and a pressed nurse gave him a dirty look when he entered the service Kevin had noted the coordinates on a post-it slipped into his passport.

"Excuse me, I'm Dean Winchester, you called me about one of your patients... Castiel Novak?"

The look of the nurse softened a bit, he didn't know if it was because he had a legitimate reason to be there, if it was because she was waiting for someone to ask after her patient, or because she knew who he was. In any case he didn't care. She indicated him the room, specifying that it wasn't visiting hours yet.

"I just want to see him, be sure that he's fine."

She nodded and pointed the end of the corridor with her finger. "Hurry, visits are usually the afternoon."

Contrary to popular belief, the hospital did not smell of sanitizer. Actually, the hallway smelled of lemon detergent that someone had just used to clean the floor, and coffee carried by a rattling carriage while caregivers in pink gown opened the doors one by one, asking patients what they wanted for their breakfast.

The room wasn't exactly white either. The walls were covered until mid-height of an unidentifiable material of a rather random green, the linoleum on the floor was clear blue and the blanket of the bed was a faded orange. The ajar door of the bathroom and the walls were of a cream shade that was perhaps just a blank which hadn't aged well. A cart, a fixed table, a chair, a bedside table and a wall cupboard into the wall composed the entire furniture except for the bed in which Castiel was sleeping. He was lying on his back, his head settled between two pillows, and with only the position Dean could tell that something was wrong. The only times Castiel was sleeping on his back rather than curled up between two layers of duvet were when the singer had his arm around his belly and that he didn't dare move for fear of waking him.

He was tempted to go out and close the door quietly but Castiel opened his eyes, turning his head toward the door with a nice smile that tensed when he recognized Dean.

"What are you doing here?" He asked, voice quavering a bit of not having been used for several hours.

"Someone called me last night to inform me that you were here. I thought that I'd drop by, you know, to see if you were still alive." Dean gritted, completely entering the room.

"Why did they do that?" Castiel sighed, closing his eyes again.

"Well, apparently I'm your person to contact in case of emergency." Dean replied, pulling the chair near the bed. Castiel pursed his lips with the movement that he reserved for circumstances in which he castigated himself for his own stupidity.

"Why didn't you call yourself Cas?" Dean asked. Castiel could hear by his voice that he was containing his fear and anger with great difficulty.

"What's the point? If I have nothing serious, then there's no need to worry, and if I have something serious, worrying will not change anything."

"You're kidding, right?"

Castiel turned his gaze to him in surprise. "Why would I make fun of you?" He asked, frowning.

Dean had an outburst of temper. "You really think I could just not worry? Since we've known each other, tell me one, just one fucking time I didn't worried, or not felt responsible when something like that happened?"

Castiel had straightened up in the bed as Dean spoke, the singer had got up from his chair and advanced to the window to try to calm down.

"This is exactly why I did not want them to call you! Because you care! Because you're going to worry more than me and I'm already terrified!"

"About what Cas? Terrified about what? A relapse? It's been eight years, you can't relapse!"

"It's in my genes Dean! I can't relapse but I can have a leukemia recurrence or another cancer or pretty much anything! And if that's the case do you know why I did not want to tell you? Because it will be ugly. It will be awful and I don't want you to see it!"

"You don't want me to see what? To see you fight? Struggle for your life? I thought I'd taught you it was worth fighting for! That's what you said, right?" Dean yelled, turning to him.

Castiel opened his mouth ready to respond and closed it after a second. He looked hurt, sad and tired and Dean immediately blamed himself for his fit of temper. He could put this on the account of his fear, of travel fatigue, of the hunger he deliberately ignored, but he still felt bad for wanting this much to yell at his lover to evacuate his own panic.

"Sorry." He apologized while sitting back. "But Cas, we're together, and that means when you fight, I fight too."

Castiel shook his head. "You can't fight with me, not here, not in these conditions."

"I know. And it kills me to be helpless." The singer said, head down.

"That's why I didn't want you to know. I didn't want you to worry."

Castiel pulled out a hand of the bed to take his. Dean raised it to his lips almost mechanically.

"You know... When I was a kid, my mother told me that angels were watching over me when she put me to bed. And maybe that was the case but shit, I wanted them to watch over her too! I had to watch over my lil' brother my whole life because our father was unable to, like those damn angels. No one was there to save Jess, not even Sam because I'd taken him somewhere else that day. So tell me, how can you demand me to not worry? To not do anything when I know that even if we're in the City of Angels, none will take care of you for me? Tell me how you can think that so that I know where I misled you all these years so you think I'm that kind of selfish bastard? Tell me."

Castiel took a long time to respond and Dean was about to apologize when "You didn't mislead me. I know there is an angel watching over me. I knew it the day I saw you and I have never ceased to be grateful since. But worry is suffering, and I think you've had more than your fill in this area."

"I'll never have my fill of you." Dean smiled. He vaguely wondered what he was looking like, with drawn features, barely clean, with tattoos and incongruous piercings in the sanitized world of Castiel.

"This is the gayest thing you've ever said to me." The young man teased.

"I know, if you repeat that to anyone I'll tear your tongue apart."

"That's my rocker!"

Dean found himself laughing and for a few seconds knowing what they looked like had no more importance. An almost smiling nurse came in with a tray for Castiel and he thanked her with the kind of smile that he usually reserved for cats in the street. Dean loved that smile and the way it crinkled his eyes and sides of the nose.

Before leaving, he bent to kiss him on the forehead and then on the mouth. Castiel still tasted like coffee and butter.

"Do us a favor, fight, since you're the only one who can! And whatever you have, promise to tell me. Promise me! So I can at least take care of you."

Castiel nodded slowly.

"I promise."

"I love you."

Castiel just blinked slowly to approve and pulled Dean to him for another kiss.

##

They needed to talk about anything other than Castiel's hospitalization. Dean had just left for the hospital and they wouldn't have news until the next morning. Charlie had disappeared in the roadies' tourbus and they wouldn't take the road for hours, waiting for the traffic to be as fluid as possible on the highway. Sam was leaning against the tourbus' hood and was smoking a cigarette, Kevin at his side. The young man had become accustomed to the smell of smoke, it was almost comforting sometimes. They were discussing this and that, just so as not to allow themselves time to think. Of course, Sam had a fixed idea for some days, and Kevin was bearing its cost.

"Dude" Sam smiled. "You had the courage to leave your life behind you to play the cello across the country, and you still can't tell a girl you've known forever that you love her?"

"As if that was easy!" Kevin grumbled crossing his arms.

"It is!"

Kevin rolled his eyes and didn't replied. It was easy for Sam to say that, he didn't have to go home and explain to the girl he loved that he had thrown away the dream of his life. Sam had nowhere to go aside from the apartment he shared with Dean in LA and Kevin considered him lucky to still have people caring for him, expecting things from him. But coming back the first time after leaving Princeton had been hard enough like that. It has been more than two years now, and he still didn't felt brave enough to knock on the door of the family home with his long hair and his piercings, and smiling to his mother, trying to make her understand that her son, her sweet little Kevin, earned his living by traveling the roads of the United States playing music. She knew it of course, and during their phone call she continually told him that the important was that he get by. But that wasn't the frank and massive endorsement nor the pride he had seen in her eyes the day he had gone to Princeton.

It was just too hard to realize that whatever may have been accomplished, it doesn't matter if you have disappointed those you love in the process. So no, it wasn't easy to pick the phone and call Channing and check in with her. Not for him.

"Watch and learn!" Sam said throwing his cigarette butt in a puddle of water. He walked over to Madison and helped her setting up a crate in a truck, smiling at her.

"Burger and fries when you're done?" He suggested loud enough so a few steps away, Kevin could hear him. She nodded with a smile and walked away to look for a new crate.

"See?" Sam said while taking back his place beside the cellist.

"Not related." The young man mumbled. "She doesn't know you, she doesn't see you as the epitome of the guy who didn't succeed."

"I thought Channing was your friend, and she didn't care whether you were famous or not?"

"That's the case. But she has values, projects, and she sticks to it. I'm not really anymore the person who was her friend back in the day when I lived in Wisconsin. And I don't think she'd like the person I am today."

Sam didn't agree, but he knew when a discussion had no chance of lead to something. He deferred the topic until later and shook his friend's shoulder. He really missed Dean at this moment because he would have needed to talk with his brother. But he didn't answer the phone, and he probably wouldn't do so before seeing Castiel. Charlie had vanished with Dorothy and his self-preservation prevented Sam from looking for them. He eventually retreated in the tourbus with the notebook in which he scribbled meaningless and no worth interest phrases just to entertain himself.

Somewhat later in the night, Madison and he sat down to table one in front of the other under the almost unpleasant neon lights of a diner which gave them a strange complexion and were making their foods appear more colorful than they were in reality.

"There are more colors on one of your tattoos than in all your songs." Madison said thoughtfully watching Sam devour a handful of fries. He wiped his hands on a napkin of a rather similar pink than the heart of the lotus that stretched inside his forearm.

"Probably because I'm more colorful outside than inside."

"Inside everyone is mostly red." The young woman replied with a smile.

"It's not what I meant."

"I know."

They were tired and didn't necessarily feel the need to make conversation. They ate in the relative silence of a Led Zeppelin hit coming out of a Juke box a few tables away.

"What has erased your colors inside?" Madison asked, stirring the ice cubes in her glass with the tip of her straw.

Sam smiled, shaking his head. "You won't get me like that."

"Come on! You can't just play the mysterious man so we ask ourselves questions, and never answer!"

"Why?"

"Because it is frustrating!" She complained.

"Maybe I like frustrate people?" He said with a slight shrug.

Madison crossed her arms, determined to get an answer to her question. He chuckled and stuck his fork into one of his last fries. He never talked about that. It was to wonder why he persisted in telling the whole story on his own skin given how much effort he put on trying to not think about it. Dean knew, knew the whole story from the beginning. Kevin had guessed a portion, Charlie had never asked a question but she knew the most important. They all knew the pain and fear, they saw it in the songs he wrote and when he shut himself up for days alone with his drums, over there at home in California, they would simply leave him alone until he felt better. Slapping on the stretched skins of the instrument was a great improvement compared to before.

"Sorry, I shouldn't have insisted." Madison apologized.

"No. It's okay. What do you wanna know?"

After all, he had to talk about it one day, right? Since tattoos and piercings weren't enough to exorcise the pain. Since as hard as he would hit his drums it'd never be enough. Since after all, it was an old story, maybe tell it would help him to put it behind him?

She stared at him for a moment.

"The lotus?" She asked with a sign from the chin toward his right arm. Sam looked at the colorful tattoo a moment as if he didn't have it on for a so long time. The flower with the yellow and pink heart opened on a bed of ginkgo leaves just below the crook of his elbow.

"They only flower once every thousand years. And ginkgo trees were the first to blossom again after Hiroshima. Eight years ago I didn't have much else to hold on to, I watched it everyday to remind me that was going on anyway. I guess it worked."

"Which one did you do after?"

Sam smiled. "One that decency doesn't allow me to show in public." Madison rolled her eyes.

"Decency isn't usually your strong suit."

He just laughed, pushing his plate. "You know, if you wanted me to get naked you just had to ask nicely."

"You know, if you want a kick you know where you just have to ask nicely!" She grumbled. But she had a smile and he ordered their desserts to change the subject.

"You didn't answer my question about colors." She said while they were returning to the concert hall a few blocks away.

"Well..." Sam started, fists clenched in the pockets of his jacket. "I am the epitome of the good kid who went wrong. Then comes a girl, she is beautiful and nice and she more or less saved me. Then she dies. But you don't want me to tell you that."

"Actually I do." Madison said, eyes fixed before her. "That's the interesting part of the story."

"No you don't. Because after you're going to feel so sorry for me that you'll have to cheer me up with sex."

He hadn't expected to see her smile nor to reply that it had always been part of her plan. He felt himself blush and looked down. Flirt and seduce was a mean of communication that had come to him quickly and rather naturally, probably by imitation, by dint of seeing Dean seducing the whole world around him without even realizing. Yet he was still shaken by the people who used the same method on him, as if it didn't ring true, as if it was an elaborate ruse to attack him.

They had returned to their starting point. The tourbus were gradually returning to life, Dorothy came down from hers holding Charlie's hand. They had matted hair as if they just awakened from a nap, which was probably the case.

"We're leaving?" Sam asked.

Dorothy nodded, yawning. "Coffee first, then we hit the road, don't linger out." She advised before pulling Charlie by the hand toward Bobby who arrived with a tray full of steaming coffee for the drivers.

"So this is where we part?" Madison asked her hand on the door handle of her bus. Sam smiled.

"I thought you wanted to know for the tattoos?"

"They'll still be there tomorrow." She replied, tightening her jacket and her arms around her. She wasn't quite sure to be comfortable with the idea of being so close to him in the reduced space of the bus. Besides she was tired.

"Yep, but tomorrow I may not feel like showing them to you anymore." Sam said, leaning against the bus door, arms crossed. "Never been told to take your chance when it passes within your reach?"

Madison seemed to consider the question for a moment before pushing him firmly as far away from the handle as he was willing to step away from.

"I have. But I can recognize an opportunity that will happen again when I see one." She said, climbing the few steps leading to the door. From her spot she was the same size as Sam, which was a first. "Send me a note when you have news of Castiel."

Sam nodded silently and she slammed the door behind her.

Charlie, Dorothy and Kevin, grouped around the tiny table in the bus were waiting for the drummer to hit the road.

"Did your date went well?"

"That wasn't a date." Said Sam, throwing off his jacket over his bunk. "Not really."

Charlie looked at him quizzically.

"How long have you been hanging round her?"

"Three weeks. And I'm not hanging round her!" He defended himself while pushing Dorothy to get a place at the table with her. He stretched his long legs in the aisle of the bus.

"I've never seen you wait three weeks before jumping on someone." Kevin teased.

"People change" Sam replied laconically. He closed his eyes, fatigue was falling on him like a blanket. "Any news of Cas?"

He heard to the silence that followed his question that the answer was negative.

##

It was the morning of a new day that Castiel wasn't thrilled to begin. It was a thing to be ill when you're a child, when you don't necessarily understand all the words of the doctors, and that nurses have pens with pompoms of all kind of colors in the pockets of their coats.

It was something else to be here again, years after. He was too old now to be hospitalized in pediatrics and nurses only had in their pocket the four color pens whose acute "click" punctuated his day.

"Click" How are you today? (It was asked cheerfully before.)

"Click" I take your temperature (You'll give it back?). Still a little fever. "Click" a note on a paper already covered with scribbles and highlighter strokes that were the only touch of color except for the blue of their gown. "Click" I'll be back.

Click click click which was sometimes accompanied by the shrill and repetitive ringing of a patient who demanded help from someone for this or that. Castiel hated that ring, the noise had certainly been specially selected to get on the hospital staff's nerves. He used it the least possible and some of the nurses, the most churlish or the softer reprimanded him regularly.

"Call when you are in pain! Do not let the pain settle!" There were the same worn out words of being too repeated regardless of the caregiver. Compassion and kindness erased by work and stress. He didn't use the bell, preferred to fend for himself and he could only imagine the exasperated sighs exchanged about him in the rest room. After all what was the point? Some pain cannot be cured, or at a price that Castiel refused to pay.

He still had temperature, and still bruises which didn't disappear. They stretched over his skin in infinite shades of green, purple, yellow and black. Sometimes, pink or orange where blood had eventually been evacuated. He watched every morning at blood sampling a new formed hematoma and every morning he half-listened the nurse apologize by pressing an alcohol swab on the little prick, pathetic attempt to prevent the hematoma from spreading.

And all of that, he didn't find the first word to say it to Dean when he called in the afternoon after landing in Memphis. Instead, he made him tell his flight, avoiding to mention the medical examinations and the blatant lack of information on his condition. But he was well placed to know that Dean wouldn't have much to say. They eventually fall into a little heavy silence.

"Cas, how you doing?" Dean asked in the same tone he would have used to calm an angry dog.

Castiel sighed, turned his gaze to the window overlooking the rooftops. At long intervals thin columns of smoke dotted the gray concrete landscape blended into the sky at dawn and at dusk when the weather was gloomy.

"I pretty much learned to count here." Castiel says quietly. "The nurses gave me problems to solve when I was little. If one milliliter equals twenty drops and you want to pass me a fifty milliliters infusion over one hour at how many drops per second must we adjust the infusion rate?"

Dean said nothing, waiting for a reasonable word to escape from his lover. Or at least something that would seem related to the question he just asked. "I know the price of medical care, three hundred dollars for transfusion. To which you must add the salaries of the medical staff, the local maintenance, expenses and insurance from the hospital. Two thousand dollars a day in hospital. Four thousand dollars a stem cell transplant. I grew up seeing my parents' savings going up in smoke year after year and I'll never be able to repay them."

"They don't ask you to. You're alive, it's the only thing that matters to them."

"I know. But the truth has no hold on the human mind. It does not change the guilt or fear. And I'm scared." That was a very light way of putting it. Actually he was terrified. Terrified that he had reasons to worry. Terrified because nurses didn't say anything to him, because he had spent the day lugged from an examination room to another, and he had no result to calm his anxiety or justify it. "I'm so scared of having ruined everything."

"Ruined what?"

"The chance that you gave me."

"You didn't ruin anything Cas! If you're ill it has nothing to do with you, whatever you've done this isn't your fault." Dean was babbling, at the other end of the country without really knowing what he was telling, just hoping that the sound of his voice and reassuring words would calm his lover.

"You don't understand." Castiel said, closing his eyes.

"Because you don't explain to me." Dean retorted in a cold tone.

"How do you want me to explain that? For you to understand, I would..." He shrugged, the movement painfully pulled on his muscles and sore neck. "I would have to make you ill within the twinkling of an eye. And then heal you the same way. For you to understand the good it does to not suffer anymore. For you to understand what I owe you."

"You don't owe me anything."

"I do." Castiel replied by detaching his eyes off the pigeons who assembled on the roof for night, far above the ground, far above the cats. "I owe you everything. But you don't understand it."

##

"You wanna change the set list tonight?"

Kevin had just sat down on the chair in front of the Dean of the Grand Lodge of the group. From the scene were coming the chords of a support band of which the young man had forgotten the name immediately after hearing it. The singer had the features drawn of someone who hasn't slept in two days. He shook his head, running a hand over his face.

"No need, I've sung each of them so much I could do it while sleeping and everyone there would be completely taken in." He said.

"Even Every Night?" Kevin asked. "I'm not even sure that Charlie get to play it without crying. Nor I neither by the way."

Dean smiled, thinking about the song. He was clenching his phone between his fingers, almost hesitant to call Castiel again. It was still early in the evening on the West Coast, he wouldn't wake him up.

"Even Every Night." He replied. The song represented something important. It was probably one of the few that Dean could understand it to speak to someone other than him. It was the only one where he explicitly talked about his relationship with Castiel and the young man had absolutely refused it to appear on their second album.

"It's a song that one shouldn't listen anyhow, in a car or as a party background music... There are words that shouldn't be led astray like this." Had decreed the accountant.

Sam had made fun of Castiel's pompous style but they had agreed and they sang it only on stage. Dean nodded again, looking at Kevin.

"We're going to play it, it doesn't matter if we don't get to the end. The important thing is to do it anyway."

"One thing I need to tell you

From the moment we met

Despite my lack of faith and my threats,

I prayed to you

Every night"

That night when walking on stage, Sam squeezed his shoulder.

"You sure?" Dean nodded. He was sure.

The screams stopped to unknown chords, only the fans who had already seen them in concert knew the song and sang it in unison. Sometimes, Dean was tempted to stop and listen to them, but he closed his eyes and continued because it was a song he wouldn't bear to hear from someone else. It was the only declaration of love that he had agreed to do to Castiel in public and probably the most explicit song of their whole discography.

"They said I would regret it,

They were wrong

'Cause everything now seem legit

Now I'm good and strong"

He had the lights in the eyes, the sounds were muffled by his ear protectors, the stage was vibrating under the anonymous flood that faced them, and for the first time in twenty-four hours, Dean felt calm. The fatigue of his lightning trip to LA still weighed on his shoulders, but the floor vibrations went up to the pit of his stomach and seemed to nestle there like the purring of a cat. He had the mind clear. When tuning his guitar for the song, he wondered if this was what Castiel felt when listening him sing, this strange calm born of the things we can control, like a reassuring routine.

"We agreed to fight

To make ourselves smile 'cause we're alive

That's our job, do it right

And do it again the next week

Or don't do it"

The realization hit him in the middle of a verse. He turned toward Sam. Dean never turned his back to the audience but for once, he looked at his brother, his look of concentration as he dutifully beat the rhythm on the snare drum. Sam looked up at him, raising a confused eyebrow. They both knew that a camera was focusing on their silent exchange and was retransmitting it on the big screen that overhanged them.

That was why Sam had proposed almost jokingly to make music. To unburden himself without anyone listening. To exorcise his pain without endangering himself and his brother only understood that now, as the words of the song resonated strangely down his throat. The young man blinked and pointed with the end of a stick Charlie who was struggling on her bass, head down to hide her tears.

"Don't ever change, I need you

Don't make me lose you too,

Cursed or not, I'd rather have you

Every night I pray to you"

Dean moved toward her and gave her a slight shoulder strike. For the public it was probably a little game between them, but that was a sign of comfort. They couldn't talk and Dean had interrupted the song to get away from his microphone. He returned there with a look of support at Charlie while continuing to align the same chords to prolong the music.

"I'm going to lose my bassist very soon, so in her defense... This song is about someone important to us and if you believe in God or anything else... I think we might need all the prayers of the world right now."

Music was also this. A universal prayer. Sam greeted his declaration of a drum roll punctuated by a violent blow on a cymbal.

"We've been through much together

I'll be by your side

Gritting my teeth and pulling the trigger

Protecting you from the rising tide"

"Why did you played it anyway?" Charlie complained later that night after the concert. She was wearing a sweater that once belonged to Sam over her black shirt and was curled up on her bunk, her eyes were almost level with Dean's who was getting undressed before going to bed himself.

He didn't reply for a second, letting the time for a Kevin with still dripping hair to go past him to join his own bunk. The bus was traveling towards St. Louis and they would need more than fifteen hours of travel to reach their destination.

Sam had spread to his designated place with a book lent by Madison and Dean looked at him thoughtfully until his brother look up to him.

"What?"

"What would you have done if we hadn't done music?" He asked, clinging with one hand to Charlie's bunk to remove his socks. He would sleep in jeans tonight, too tired to take it off and anyway after being worn for forty-eight hours the clothing was what Dean was considering as more comfortable in the world. Sam closed his book, one finger between the pages and looked up at Kevin who was climbing on top of him to his own bed.

"I would have added lines to my criminal record I guess."

"What about you Kevin?"

"Do I have to answer to your riddle? I'm sleepy!" The young man groaned while turning his back to him.

Dean and Sam laughed softly. The singer raised his hand to take in his Charlie's which was hanging from her bunk.

"What would you've done Princess?"

"Accepted the job at Google I imagine."

Another laugh.

"Finally we're certainly all better here." Sam said, putting his book on the floor before slipping under the blanket. Dean nodded and pressed one last time Charlie's hand before releasing it. He slipped in his turn between the sheets that still vaguely smelled like Castiel and closed his eyes, sighing.

"I'll fight for you if I have to,

They say we're wrong to believe

That dreams can come true

They're wrong and as long as I live

I'll put on a smile for you

And every night

I'll pray for you."

"You know why I kept the song tonight Princess?"

"To piss me off?"

Dean smiled and straightened to hit the mattress of his friend's bunk, earning a groan of protest.

"So, why?" She asked in a lower tone.

The engine noise and breathings of Kevin and Sam created a confined and gentle atmosphere. Or exhaustion was getting the best of Dean's last barriers. He closed his eyes and let himself be overwhelmed by waves of sleep.

"Because it's the music that matters. Not the musician." He said softly before falling asleep.