WARNINGS: Weecest? Sam loves his brother in all the worst ways. Sam/Dean- it isn't mutual. You've been warned.

Sam couldn't say when he realized it. All he could ever say was that it defined him, consumed him, destroyed him and saved him. It was the kind of obsessive love that swirls like a ride at a carnival, just him and the poor object of his affection, trapped in a construct of dirty metal. He couldn't say when he realized it but he knew he would never be able to pinpoint when it stopped. Because it never stopped. He was strapped into the dirty metal for good and there was no getting out.

Puberty would be the easiest and most obvious landmark. Finally a physical manifestation of something he was just beginning to understand. That hazy curtain of youth was falling back and suddenly he was at least physically aware of his captivity.

He was twelve and he walked into the motel room early, despite having put up quite a fuss about a school project needing extra hours at the library. John was gone, as always and forever, and Dean was sprawled on the bed.

Before Sam noticed the movie and what Dean was doing with it, he noticed the smell. It was something primal, animal in its muskiness and intoxicating in the small room. When Sam heard the comically loud groan from the television screen and then let his eyes snap to Dean with his hand in his lap. There was a smell and a fast snapping rhythm and Sam was entranced by it.

"Jesus fucking—Oi, perv, shut the door and take a picture, will you?!" barked Dean when he realized that his private moment was suddenly much less private. Despite his bravado, Sam saw his brother's ears turn pink as he hastily zipped himself back into his pants. There was another groan and Dean thrashed on the bed for the remote before lunging across the room to turn off the television manually.

Dean opened and closed his mouth a few times before throwing on that mask of his; hard, indifferent and unashamed.

"Casa Erotica. Dad always uses the same password, if you wanted…" and Dean looked down at Sam, clearly wishing himself elsewhere.

Sam knew about sex, the things from school, at least. He knew about ovaries and fallopian tubes and sperm and eggs. He even had a general idea of the act, a million sitcoms of a man and a woman and a passionate kiss, then fade to black, cut to commercial and the camera opened to the next morning and tastefully draped sheets.

But he had never seen it so explicitly portrayed. The woman's opening was glistening. The man's cock and balls were hairy. And the smell, which Sam now realized was the odor of sex, haunted his senses as vividly as the woman. Blonde and tan, on her hands and knees and it's connection to Dean's lazy rhythm as he watched, entranced, as her glistening rose-petal vagina was penetrated.

Sam was sure that it was at least heavily implied, if not stated outright, that Dean was going to be the person Sam went to for The Talk. And, clearly, Dean was wondering just where to start. Dean never kept secrets from Sam, even proudly declared when he 'nailed' Mandy Simmons in the tenth grade, but now there was a smell and bodily fluids and something much more complicated to work through. Sam smiled at Dean, that same hard mask that Dean had perfected himself, and let Dean off the hook.

"We're good, Dean. Sorry I… intruded."

Dean looked immensely relived and mortified at the same time. "Ok, nerd, um… so, dinner? I'll go… pick something up." And Dean ran out the door before Sam had time to do or say anything else. Dean escaped the stifling room, uncomfortably silent with the TV off and still lingering with the smell of Dean's sex.

Sam walked to the bed where Dean was and sat on it, looking around. On the night stand was a bottle of lotion, the aloe vera scented perfume mixed with that heady scent and Sam was much more curious about the latter. He laid down on the bed, horizontally to the Dean's vertical position earlier. Placing his head where Dean's lap had been Sam took a deep sniff.

It was Dean's smell.

After that, Sam was suddenly much more aware of his own body, the tightness in his stomach, the pressure between his legs. As he cleaned himself in the shower, he began to stroke himself like Dean had, finding that the rhythm was not unique to Dean but the rhythm of sex altogether. Sam was a little disappointed at that.

As Sam masturbated, images flashed through his mind, never really settling on anything in particular. A woman from a magazine ad. The porn star's glittering lips between her legs. The motion was satisfying, like scratching the most delicious itch, but never became anything more than a rhythm until Sam got bored or tired.

Finally, on a night when Dean was out on a date, Sam turned on the television and found the same video that Dean had watched. Almost automatically, his sweatpants expanded and as a reflex, Sam started pumping himself as he watched the girl bend over. Sam heard the door. Sam heard the footsteps and a very small, distant part of him told him to stop and put himself away. But he didn't. Perhaps it was because Sam was always very curious by nature and had a perverse need to know what would happen next.

Or perhaps he realized it then.

"Oh! Uh, shit, uh, sorry!" said Dean, turning away to face the closed door, "Sorry, Sammy, maybe we should make a system or something." He said with a strained chuckle on the end. Sam slowly pulled his pants up and turned off the video, but otherwise didn't move or say anything. He waited curiously, perhaps hopefully.

Dean turned back around and, after looking at Sam for a second, rolled his eyes back up to the ceiling.

"Uh, dude," he said, and Sam realized that he was still fully aroused. Dean smiled weakly, "Uh, how about you hop in the shower and, uh, clean up, and I'll set the table." He held up a grease spotted take-out bag.

In the shower, Sam let himself resume the rhythm, but it was faster now, the itch was all consuming, knotting his insides, clenching his hips. The reel of images started up again, but instead of glistening pussy lips there were footsteps and the comically wide green eyes. But instead of turning away, horrified, Sam's imagination took over and Dean stayed. He stood there and watched, breathed in Sam's smell and was mesmerized by Sam's rhythm. In the fantasy, Dean didn't look away, didn't hide from Sam's vulnerability and need. In the fantasy, Dean unconsciously licked his lip like he sometimes did when he was thinking or listening real hard and Sam finally, officially conquered that wall in his stomach. He came; beautiful, undignified splurts of himself washing down the drain with the water.

It wasn't until he was fourteen that, in the fantasy, Dean took those three deliberate steps across the room to his bed. Dean took his hand and replaced it, matching his pace and watching Sam fall apart beneath him. It wasn't until he was sixteen that the fantasy Dean lowered his head and accepted him into his mouth. Dean on his knees in the bathrooms of a 24 hour diner. Dean rolling over in the night and reaching across their bed to press a finger to Sam's hole. Sam in the back seat of the impala, crying in pain and ecstacy as Dean claimed him fully, holding his thighs against his chest and watching as Sam imploded.

Sometimes he dreamed of the first time, Dean's eyes filled with concern, fear, and yet unmistakeable want. That addictivley dark battle of 'Dirtywrongbad' was overridden by 'lovelovelove' and then it was sweaty, panted bliss. Sometimes he fantasised about waking up in bed together, then the comfortable, lazy morning sex of long lovers. Sometimes Dean kissed him, slow, savoring, with no where to be an no agenda. Sometimes Dean shoved him down and took ruthlessly, as though he was as starving for Sam as Sam was for him.

And the fantasies consumed him, burned him like a fever, fueling him like dry kindling in a forrest fire. It got to the point that Sam preferred his moments in the shower, the Dean of his fantasies to the one in real life. Because this Dean, the real Dean, was the grown up one, the confident one, the one with his shit together, but he wasn't the one who groaned Sam's name a plea for mercy and a plea for more at once.

So Sam left, because he had to. As long as he was with Dean, he was addicted to that smell and that fantasy of a motel room and a lingering gaze. All Sam wanted from Dean was to be laid bare before him, stripped of his clothes, of his dignity, of his pride and his shame and just let Dean take whatever was left. It was the only thing he wanted and the only thing he could never have, so Sam left to find whatever was second best.

He got to Stanford, and he got drunk. The memory of Dean's betrayed expression, a face so contorted with hurt that it was beyond recognition and the realization that Sam had smashed that up all by himself were the only things he took with him. Dean gave Sam everything, everything thing he had and it would never be enough. Because Sam didn't know when he realized that it would never go away. He didn't know if it was when he was twelve and he smelled his brother and felt a pull in his gut, like gravity. Dean was so bright and burning with life and sexuality and beauty and Sam was just some pathetic meteor, orbiting it. He never as close as he needed to be but close enough to get burned nonetheless. And Sam left, some miracle or curse pulled him from his endless torment and it was downright frigid out here without Dean.

Dean had looked at him like Sam had wrecked the impala into the last apple orchard on earth, dooming him to a life without pie and his car. Because Dean loved pie and his car and his brother. Sam loved nothing but Dean's smell and rhythm. He pulled his phone out of his pocket and composed a text to a number that he would never forget for as long as he lived.

"I am in love with you." He typed and he stared at it and wondered if six words, so simple and small and generic on the bright screen could convey the six years worth of nights and touches and smells that Sam had played out through his head.

They had moved together. They had held together. They had tasted each other and it was all in Sam's head. It was only in Sam's head. In real life, Sam had laid himself bare and Dean had turned around and faced the door. Their love, their intimacy, their shared desire and shame and need was cut in half. It was just Sam. It would never be anything besides just Sam. Their love story was cut in half. It was better that way.

Sam sobbed. Alone, in a bar with a fake ID, Sam sobbed over his cell phone. He hurriedly deleted part of the message.

"I love you." It read.

Six simple words, an entire epic love story, were cut in half. It was better that way.

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