Hi there! This was originally going to be an original story, but after working on it for around 6 months it came to a standstill. Hopefully by transfiguring it into a fanfic I'll be inspired to finally finish it, plus my characters make a pretty good fit already.
Let me know what you think :)
Side note: This is also a "Young Winchesters" fic: Sam is 19, Dean is 23, and Castiel is around 24.

The title is taken from a song composed by Karl Jenkins. It sounds like a Latin chant, but every word is actually just complete jibberish. That's the title here because their exorcisms are also faked, just like the "Latin" in his song.

"Fuckin' blood." I mumbled under my breath as I scrubbed my hands clean under the less-than-optimal greenish lighting of a rank gas station bathroom.

I'd let him go.

That was something I hadn't done, well, ever. I was still a little bit stunned at myself, to be completely honest. I felt strange. Numb, more like. What I'd done just so wasn't me.

Well, to be fair, it had been. Once. But that had been a long time ago. The very first time I'd had to beat a Churchmember to a bloody pulp and felt his very last breath brush up against my screaming knuckles, I'd crouched by his unconscious body for an hour afterwards. I'd muttered every prayer for forgiveness I knew, in Latin and English, tears leaking out of my eyes until my eyeballs felt like starch and my eyelids were swollen. It had been too close to when I'd severed my ties with the Church to do something like that, I realized now. I'd been a wreck, I'd dragged myself to some bar to wash off and then basically crawled back home. I wish I could have that kind of remorse now, instead of a twisted kind of triumph when I'd catch them. Better start saving up to pay Charon now, right?

I shook my head. No, I didn't want to think about that anymore. I focused instead at the task at hand. Now, I'll just say it.

Dealing with humans is downright gross.

They're always spurting their bodily fluids everywhere with no respect. The stuff I usually dealt with came out clean. There was maybe a little bit of ectoplasm here or there back when I had a job dealing with demons and the possessed, that was no biggie, and absolutely no cleanup when I got down to my current job.

This whole 'blood' thing was so not my thing.

Red swirled down the sink. In this failing fluorescent lighting, the blood looked blackish, the porcelain of the sink a washed-out green. I raised my eyes to the small, dirty mirror, noting the little bloom of black along one corner of the silver rectangle. Half of the glass was covered with an alluring, quick scribble of white graffiti which was floating, doubled, with its reflection behind it. I met my eyes as I scrubbed, the soap made my split knuckles smart.

The skin of my face looked almost cheesy in the bad lighting. My greenish eyes barely reflected any light, they seemed like twin dark buttons staring back at me.

I looked a mess, my cheeks were scruffy and I had dark swatches under my reddish eyes. I splashed my face, the scruff on my cheeks abrasive in my palms. My skin felt clammy even through a layer of warmish water, and met my reflection once again.

Damn, I looked so tired. My eyelids were puffy and the whites of my eyes were tinted a slight pink. There you are, Scruffy Insomniac Dean. Well, hello again, old friend.

I'd have to hurry home before anybody noticed I was gone.

Home, I scoffed and worked a dark red stain from my sleeve. That's a laugh. Home to most wasn't a crappy camper van that you have to share with three others.

I finally admitted defeat and knew that this was as good as it was going to get, and splashed my face one more time before shutting the faucet off with a faint squeal.

I snatched up the bathroom key and dipped back into the gas station store. The fluorescent harsh lights illuminated the tiny store so completely that it almost gave it the illusion that it was somehow surreal, like it was on a different plane than the blanketing darkness outside.

"Thanks," I mumbled, placing the key back on the counter. I frowned as I noticed a bloody thumbprint on the rectangular plastic of the label on the key. Shoot. "Sorry, about that, just a second." I wet my finger with the tip of my tongue and smudged the print away.

"Uh, here you are." I handed it back to the cashier and laughed nervously. The man stared speechlessly at me, blinking dumbly like a farm animal. He'd had the same expression on his face when I'd come in. Looks like I'd officially spooked him. Oops. I had to fight back the urge to grin.

"Uh, for your trouble?" I dug out a crumpled bill from my pocket and plopped the wad down on the counter. "And that'll cover this too, right?" I snagged a slim jim and shot the poor guy what I hoped was a reassuring smile.

Then, I spotted something behind the counter, a peculiar flier taped to one of the windows behind the cashier that I hadn't noticed on the way in. I ambled out of the store and swung around toward the back, taking a few yanking bites of my slim jim.

I cocked my head to the side slightly and looked at the artist's rendition "Wanted" poster that had been taped up on the outside of the store. The black-and-white poster was divided into four cells of sketches. There was my younger brother Sam, his dark brown floppy locks messy as usual, his green eyes peering ever-innocently. That's my brother, the human puppy.

Then there was the sketch of my friend Levi, a guy with his ginger-brown hair tied back into a wolftail and tattoos all the way up to his collarbones. The penultimate rendition was of Kara, an oval-faced Asian girl with pin-straight black hair parted down the middle, which framed her face like curtains. Even the small, devious smile the artist had drawn on her seemed to say "try and find me. I dare you."

The one of me barely even resembled me. My jaw couldn't nearly be that square. And I know for a goddamn fact my eyebrows aren't that perfect. And where were those beautiful purple undereye swatches?

Well, no wonder that churchmember Castiel hadn't recognized me right away when I'd met him. The dickwad drawn here looked like someone who, for starters, didn't beat the shit out of people under a highway overpass at two o' clock in the morning, or maybe a guy who actually washed their hair everyday or actually, you know, slept more than a rocky four hours a night.

Nah, that's asking too much. I chuckled to myself and tore the flier down, crumpling it into a little ball. I knew for a fact the only phone number on the flier had been the man's that my very hands balling the paper had beat up just a few moments ago. I tipped the paper ball into the trash bin, and it felt like a small weight had been lifted as I watched it fall into that miniature abyss.

The Church wasn't close to finding and capturing us anymore. That was all that mattered.

Sam had been keeping tabs on this man "Castiel" for as long as he'd been trailing us, peeking into his head and his dreams, but the churchman had thought he'd had it in the bag. It was almost cute, how much the guy thought he could have done it. You can't catch someone who's been in your head, dick.

My little brother is an Astral Projector. So are the others in the cramped camper I'm living out of.

Basically, Projectors have souls that aren't always attached to their bodies like us normal people, and they get flung into God-knows-who's head at night, and they become forced spectators of strangers' dreams. They can try to get into a head on purpose, too, but that was more difficult.

People were afraid of my brother and people like him, especially the people from the Church. Sam was officially diagnosed with it at three years old. How anyone could look at a toddler with big, puppy-dog eyes wearing fuzzy green dinosaur footsie pajamas and deem him as a "dangerous creature" was beyond me.

Dangerous, my ass. If you ever met the kid, you'd know what I mean. He's got messy brown hair that always is flopping over his eyes, a little ski-slope nose, gangly limbs he hasn't really quite grown into even now. I mean, my kid brother will have one beer and be pretty much hammered. He likes to pick arguments about grammar when he's drunk, too. See where I'm going with this?

Yet Astral Projectors have a stigma, and a pretty bad one at that. Even young kids on playgrounds create vague ideas about what one would look like; shifty-eyed people in perfectly pressed suits with inhuman smiles who work for the "bad guys". Their expertise would be weaseling and burrowing their way into people's minds like squirming rats. Regular people believe that Projectors can manipulate emotions, drive people crazy, assassinate people, the like.

Kids could come up with some crazy shit. Unfortunately, adult's beliefs weren't much different.

And it was dangerous to be one, especially as an adult. None of them usually made it to adulthood before they'd be taken away- but by who or what, no one actually knows. Just one day- poof, and they're gone. I'll admit, all this running away was pretty tiresome.

I thought back to the man I'd caught and let go of tonight.

I remembered his eyes the most. They were such a faded grey-blue color they almost looked like a drowned person's. Or maybe like all the color had simply drained away from the bottoms of them, leaving only a faint blue stain. I'd never seen such a corpse-like color on a living person before.

And there had just been something about him. Sure, he'd had that stick-up-his-ass look all the churchfolk pricks had, perfectly pressed clothes without even a speck of lint and neatly combed hair with each strand in perfect place. It had to be something in those unbelievably light eyes, just...something. Maybe it had been that second of hesitation: his lips had parted as if he wanted to say something else, but then they'd stubbornly pressed back together and his eyes had flicked over to the side in defiance, not looking at me anymore.

I can't place why I noticed these things. He'd said all the same warm-and-fuzzy things as the other men, like "you and your kind are inhuman abominations" or, one of my favorites, "you're as close to a demon a human can physically get."Wow, I haven't heard those before.

He'd known a lot less than I'd assumed, thinking I was one.

You'll burn in hell for siding with those creatures,was the next thing he'd hissed with a mouthful of 'd pulled that phrase out of his ass after he'd been proved wrong, when he found out I wasn't a Projector. Castiel's voice had grown guttural from the pressure of my pretty little switchblade pressed up on his throat, and his response had been weak and so rehearsed.

Well, if I'm going to hell for siding with these people, so be it. It would be too hard to try to aim to be some kind of "hero" by this society's standards anyway, and I would rather be stabbed in the asscheek with a dull knife then be looked up upon by these people, when the ideal human being is a blind sheep to the Church, and an even more ideal human are those who would do anything for the Church, like Mr. Stick-Up-His-Ass. Hell, I still couldn't believe I'd let him go.

This world wasn't exactly cut out for people like us. So, we carved and clawed out our own place. My brother and I and a couple of other Projectors now live on the road, just trying to scrape by with the money we make from our faked exorcisms.

Okay.

Well, I'll admit, that does sound weird jumping to conclusions there with no context. I'll have to get back to you on that one.

I stuck my stinging hands into the big front pocket of my hoodie and sighed when I saw that the small yellow bulb that sat just above the edge of the camper's door was still lit, despite the fact that it was almost five in the morning, and I'd left around two. Someone inside must have awoken and noticed I was gone in the middle of the night.

The keys jingled faintly as I fished them out of my back pocket, but before I could unlock the door it swung open. My little brother met my eyes, his expression was extremely unamused and he looked a thousand times more tired in the dim yellow light of the single bare bulb.

"You had me worried sick." Sam frowned and crossed his arms over his chest.

"Well, I'm here now." I replied wearily and tried to muster up a smile. He snorted. That was definitely my worst excuse yet.

He took my wrist and raised an eyebrow. Dammit. I still had a little bit of blood darkening the small crescents of my short fingernails. My knuckles were a swollen, puffy pink and the small splits were still a raw red.

"It's nothing." I tried to brush it off. "I...um, dropped something on 'em earlier today." He wasn't supposed to know what I'd done, well, not exactly. All he was supposed to know was if we had a tail, I got rid of it. He didn't have to know the specifics. I didn't want him to know the specifics.

"Yeah, right." Sam snorted. He let my arm go, and it plopped down onto my thigh. Sam raised his eyebrows and gave me that smug shit-eating sibling smirk that usually ended with a mother prying two kids apart. "Tell me, was it that guy I've been checking up on? Brother, uh, whatizname...Castiel?"

"Fine," I answered, then avoided his eyes and crossed my arms. I hated talking about this. "Yes, it was."

He didn't quite seem to know how to reply. I bit on my lower lip. What I had to do to protect him, to protect everyone else I was living with- it was the biggest, brightest, neon-flashing elephant in the room.

"Did you rebind for the night?" I asked, trying to avoid the subject and meeting his eyes again. If he waited too long after waking up, his soul would reseal to his body, so he wouldn't be able to get back to sleep until the next night. See, Projectors had to find out these kinds of things for themselves.

"Not yet." Sam said softly, rubbing the bottom of his nose. "I've been waiting for you to come back for around….an hour and a half, now."

"Wanna go for a beer?" I asked, trying to give him the best warm smile I could come up with, considering my current circumstances.

"Hm. Fine." His sighed and ran a hand down his face. "But don't fucking scare me like that again, Dean." He mumbled grumpily and moved to the side of the doorframe to finally let me in.

I opened up our mini fridge and fished two beers out of the fridge for us. Sam reached up to the small roost of the camper and tugged his blanket down.

I tried not to look at Levi as I got the drinks. His caramel-colored eyes were wide open and they tracked my movements as he snored. One of his eyes was fully dilated, a wide black hole, and the other a normal, friendly brown. Poor Levi, I thought, but still didn't want to get much nearer as his off-balance glazed eyes peered out at me from the shadows. Not like I was afraid of him- we'd been friends since preschool. I just had to convince myself that he wasn't awake, but it was kind of hard when it looked like he was staring right at me.

I unlatched the door to the outside and carried two green-bottled beers in one hand, I swung open the door and stepped outside into the dark and Sam followed, hiking up his blanket.

We both swung around to the back and scaled the silver pool-like ladder that lead up to the roof of the camper, the bulky A/C boxes and the skylight leaving just a small flat space for us to sit on top. Sam grumbled about sacrificing his blanket for us to sit on instead of the cold, dewy metal, but did it anyway.

I twisted off the top of a beer, which I handed to Sam first. He took it by the glass neck and waited for me to open mine too before he took the first sip; an unspoken rule.

"So, we got another job tomorrow, then?" Sam asked, and the bitter taste of beer and the little kick of the bubbles burned down my throat at the first sip. I nodded.

I looked out at the scenery; tall telephone poles with lamp heads sticking out of them lead a straight line all the way down the road, getting successively smaller until their amber-yellow glows were out of sight, and to the right was just a dark field, and beyond that lumpy, dark shapes of the clouds in the distance. It looked like it might storm later.

"I just..." Sam paused and I tried to read his expression, it was hard to make out in the dark, but he was looking off into the distance as well and he seemed troubled by the little wrinkle that was forming between his eyebrows. "Do you think they're getting closer to finding us out 'cause of how many jobs we're taking on nowadays?"

I took a small sip of beer before answering. "No. They're not any closer to catching us than when we first started, Sammy." I rubbed my ridge of swelling knuckles once again. "Not if I have anything to do with it." I explained wearily, my beer hanging limply between my legs as I rested my arm on my thigh, my feet perched on the short guardrail of the van.

"Yeah," Sam replied. "I guess not, then."

I looked down the dark hole leading into the neck of the bottle and watched a few yellowish fizzy bubbles climb up from inside.

"Sometimes I wish I could go home." Sam admitted after a moment, setting his beer to the side and hugging his knees up to his chest.

"Yeah, me too." I spoke up again. "But Dad found new wife, step kids, hell, even that new kid." Another sip. "He doesn't worry about us." I lied through my teeth. I knew he'd want us back home more than anything, but I didn't want my brother to know that.

"How do you know?" Sam asked, meeting my eyes and frowning.

"He probably worried at first about us. But he doesn't care anymore, Sam. He has a new life now, one we're not a part of and it should stay that way." I said, and regretted I'd let that much bitterness show in my voice.

"I guess it's just us two then, big brother." Sam looked at something in the distance and folded his eyes closed. There was a beat of heavy silence, and I looked out at the darkened field and took another bitter sip.

Sure, it's been tougher than a normal life on the road. I miss getting to have a shower whenever I wanted to, and being able to actually stand up after getting out of bed, and having, y'know, milk with my cereal, but I've gotten used to all these things. I don't hate anything in my life right now, not really. We just watched the dark sky in silence for a moment, the crickets' staccato trilling coming from the field to the right were pleasant bursts of sound in the night.

And I realized that we were just two tiny, tiny people in this great, big, awful world.

I sat back with my palms behind me and leaned into my arms, tipping my head back to look at the velvety black sky with the pinpricks of brittle stars. Sam still hadn't finished his beer, and he took a little sip and tipped his head back too.

"You ever wish we lived in the Before?" Sam asked softly. That was unexpected.

I laughed a little. "Oh, just 'cause it's late doesn't mean I want to get all philosophical too, Sam. That's one difference between us. You have a beer, you get philosophical. I have a beer and I just want to talk about cute chicks."

"Or did you mean chicks you've banged? 'Cause that pie chart doesn't cross," Sam snorted, and I playfully swiped at the back of his head.

"Bitch," I grumbled. He threw his head back and laughed, showcasing his back molars like he usually does.

"Hey, the 'people I've banged' circle isn't gonna cross with any pie chart, wiseass." I rolled my eyes and chuckled. "Hm. Pie. Now that I could go for."

Sam let out a small huff of a laugh and tipped back another sip of beer. "Yeah, yeah. You've told me a thousand times." He grinned around the green lip of the bottle. I'm glad he came up here with me to talk. I hadn't been feeling so great about my decisions for the night.

"Seriously, though." Sam still had his neck craned to look at the stars. "I wonder what it would be like to live back in A.D.?"

"We're not little kids anymore, Sam, it's been years since we played this game." I said, but I humored him, and he knew it.

"But that was the ridiculous kiddie stuff. Sailing in the Niña, building the Great Wall of China, looting with Pirates. I mean what was it really like, Dean?"

I was born in 319 A.M., Anno Metere, or the Year of the Reaping. Three hundred and forty-three years ago was when Hell opened up on Earth, and the fields of humanity were finally harvested. The humans God considered to be good, his wheat, went with him, and the weeds, the darnel, stayed on Earth. He'd promised he'd never commit a mass genocide ever again like the time of Noah's arc, but hell, this whole "abandonment" idea as opposed to murder wasn't much of a better strategy, either.

These weeds stayed and were ripped apart by the Hellcreatures and everything was chaos and death and every man for himself. Until the Church became the only thing people could turn to, and it built itself back again from the ground up. Too bad the new foundation was damn crooked. People flocked for security, for protection, for some kind of certainty in the Hell the Earth had become.

And here I am in the aftermath three hundred years later, the result of generations of the people who had been left behind by God, who hadn't been good enough for him to take. Bet that makes me look like an awful good person, doesn't it?

"Don't you ever wonder what it was like?" Sam prompted again.

"Sometimes. But it doesn't matter. It's not like we go back," I concluded somewhat moodily and tipped the very last sip of beer into my mouth and set the bottle down again on the hood with a clink.

"But people have tried to make things better! What if we had science, Dean, and we didn't have to heal all these people pretending to be something we're not! What if-" Sam was getting all worked up again.

"Enough," I interrupted him gruffly. I brought my hands up to my temples and massaged in slow circles. "Things are how they are, Sam. We're just four people in a great big bad world. We're doing something, that's all that matters."

"Do you think we're all still darnel and tares?" Sam asked in a whisper, and he knew I'd catch onto what he meant after all my years spent Training. Funny he should ask me that, but we seemed to think along the same lines pretty often.

Not much had changed since 0 AM, well, societal-wise. The people, however, the darnel-people who hadn't been good enough to harvest...

Even Jesus was related to Cain, wasn't he? Even the Son of God was related to the Father of Murder. And after three hundred years, after all these generations, we couldn't all be bad still. Right? But we couldn't be the pure and good people he'd taken in the first place, either. We had to be something of a different breed by now.

"...No," I answered him carefully after a second of thought, wetting my lips with a sweep of my tongue. "But we sure as hell aren't wheat anymore either."

And with that, I slipped back and began to climb back down from the roof. Sam didn't follow me right away, the door to the van squealed open, and I sighed. I didn't want to go back inside without him, so I just waited.

Honestly, I didn't know what God's plan was for us anymore, "us" being his abandoned people. I don't know if He really knows His plan either, as crazy as that sounds.

"You're heading back in already?" Sam called out to me, peering over the edge of the van. He looked like a little owl with his messy brown hair and his hands perched on the railing and I didn't even try to fight back my laugh this time.

"Yeah, I'm heading back to bed." I told him, craning my neck to look up at him.

He looked back out to the empty field and the black tree line like billows of clouds, and a cool night breeze brushed my cheeks. I sometimes wonder what my brother thought about in times like these.

"You coming, Sammy?" I asked with a little chuckle after a moment of silence. "Or sleeping out there? 'Cause I'll lock you out. "

He rolled his eyes. "I'm coming." He tipped the rest of his beer, which was probably just bubbles and backwash, into his mouth and clambered off the roof as well with those ridiculously lanky limbs, going slightly slower as he carried the bunched-up blanket. It must have been much later than I thought, because I swore I saw just the beginning of dawn glowing on the horizon.

"I'm sorry I got frustrated with you." I told Sam as I laid back down on my futon in the camper's roost and pulled all the blankets over me. "The AD game used to be fun, you know. And as we got older-"

"-just friggin' depressing." Sam interrupted with a small grin.

I chuckled and bumped my shoulder to his. "Exactly."

I climbed the slightly squeaky ladder and slipped under the covers. Sleep weighed heavy on me almost immediately.

"Are you tired?" Sam asked in a hushed voice beside me.

"Hmm. Little bit." I yawned and buried my face into his fluff of pillows. Hopefully that would send him the message. Not everyone has a fancy-schmancy soul that reseals like yours, Sam. I thought with a tiny smile that I hid under the top of my blanket.

"Can you tell me what demons are like? What you saw in those Exorcisms you helped with?" Sam asked softly. "You've never really told me about them before."

"Well, you've never asked." My voice was muffled as I spoke up and finally turned to face him. "But you don't want to have any more nightmares than you already have, Sam, trust me." I raised an eyebrow at him, even though he probably could barely see me in the dim, amber light that filtered through from the streetlamp above us.

"Do they really have black eyes and speak in a low multivoice?" Sam scooted over and poked my shoulder. "What about the...you know, smoke? Or maybe spaded tails? Or claws? Or.."

"Jesus, Sam, the answer is no to all of those." I chuckled. "I thought you knew a little better than that, at least." I peeped one eye over the covers at him. "Tell you the truth, it's just...well, nothing."

"Nothing?" Sam parroted, his voice quiet in disbelief.

"Yeah, Sammy, nothing. Just like you can't really see who has a mental illness from the outside. I mean, possessed people act different, but the demons, the spirits...just, nothing. Or they're invisible to us humans, at least." I contemplated saying this next part, but to hell with it.

"-Kind of like your soul." I spoke up again. "Have you ever seen it? Or seen other people's, like Kara's coming back to her body or Levi's floating around?"

"I..I haven't." He whispered. There was a small beat of silence. "Holy crap, that's terrifying."

"I guess so." I replied. "Invisible is almost scarier than claws and spaded tails and black eyes, huh?" I teased, peeping my eye open again to see his expression. He looked troubled.

"I don't really know." Sam replied, deep in thought, and he reached for a book he kept next to his bed. "...So, nothing, huh?" He took a little page-clip flashlight that hung over the page like an angler fish's bait and clicked it on.

"Are you using that- you're such a nerd." I laughed when I heard that tiny click and took a corner of his blankets and rolled over so that my back was to him. I'd given him that reading light as a gift during his senior year of high school since he loved his schoolwork. I didn't know he'd kept that crappy thing this whole time, much less bring it with the few belongings he could onto this tiny camper.

"Goodnight, Dean." Sam fake snapped at me and started reading, trying to hide his smile.

The birds began to wake up and chirp and make a racket from a mass of trees nearby, I heard Levi's quiet scraping of handcuffs on a metal pole from downladder, and I thought about the four of us on some abandoned road in the middle of nowhere all snug in this crappy camper, off to help the next guy...

"Y'know, dandelions are weeds too." Sam said softly, and something about his voice told me he was smiling. He flipped a page with a papery rustle. "And I think they're wonderful."