Name Calling
Back in his room in the Bunker, Dean sat on his bedroom floor. It had been a hell of a few days: agreeing to be a suicide bomber to restore the balance of Light and Dark, Mom back from the dead after thirty-three years and left again, and the British chapter of the Men of Letters kidnapping and torturing Sam. Even by Winchester standards, that was a lot to deal with.
"That's why I saved you years ago... You're the firewall between light and darkness."
The Firewall.
He sat, sipping at his beer and considered all the names he'd been called over the years.
The very first, obviously, was {Dean}. After his grandmother, Deanna. He chuckled. If he'd learned that at the wrong age he would have hated knowing that. Not to mention the ammunition that would have given his brother during the Sam/Samantha teasing. Now? It was kinda nice to have a piece of his family forever with him, forever a part of him. Deanna Campbell had been a good woman, inviting him into her home and cooking for him; offering a little comfort in the harsh world of a Hunter's life.
His first nickname had been {Buddy}. Dad called him that when he was a toddler. "C'mon, Buddy, get your jacket on. There's enough light still to make it to the park. How about it? Want me to push you on the swings a bit?" "Hey Buddy, let's help your mom with dinner and get the table set, okay?" "Here we go, Buddy, keep your eye on the ball... right into your glove." Some of his happiest memories of his dad from Before all started with him calling his son by the nickname. He loved being John Winchester's little buddy, loved the attention, loved him.
Dean sighed heavily. It was a shame Sam never got to know that John Winchester. After the fire, their dad never really called either of them nicknames any more. He wasn't really the same dad anymore.
{Dee'}. Baby Sammy couldn't really manage the 'N' sound at the end of the name when he got around to talking. Still, the shortened name was the boy's first word. Yes, he followed shortly with Da-Da. If Dean and John had been on any kind of equal footing back then, Dean would have bragged about that: in Sammy's world his big brother came first. And Dean loved being a big brother; always had, always will.
{The New Kid a.k.a. The Freak} came next. Once they became Hunters, once they hit they road, Dean became the professional new kid at school. It sucked. He had four years of grade school that Sammy never saw, where he had been teased mercilessly for being different. They had no idea how different. They saw the beat up backpack, resale shop clothes. Often they heard an accent. They found out about Mom... Didn't matter why, really, just mattered that kids could be vicious and he had no idea how to handle it. It was one of many reasons that Dean always hated school.
By high school, he had the routine down pat: arrive, pick up the hot chick, have her introduce him around to her friends. Instant in. Having the hot chick on his arm solved the cafeteria conundrum of which clique to sit with. Inevitably, the jock ex-boyfriend (or current boyfriend) would have a problem with him for stealing his girl which led to the confrontation. Which Dean always won, naturally. Of course, being able to drop the entire defensive line didn't help the 'freak' label.
Sam thought he was a freak because of the whole demon blood thing. Dean thought they'd been freaks a whole a lot longer than that.
{John's Dog}. Demons liked to throw that one in his face. Like he didn't know what other Hunters called him behind his back. Or a couple of times to his face. "Yeah, Dean, be a good dog. Stay. Guard." Cox always was an asshole. So was Anderson: "Sic 'em, Boy!" Like he didn't know that most sons didn't do everything their dad told them when he told them, how he told them. Hell, even ghost-whammied Sam threw that one in his face in that haunted asylum.
Like he didn't have wishes and dreams of his own? Dean could remember the various time in his life when he was given a choice or faced a choice: Apple Pie Life or Hunter. When he was twelve and chose to get out of the car and stand with his dad to get Sammy back from the monster-bitch that kidnapped him. When he was sixteen, watching the werewolf burn and realized he would see and part of something few others would. When he was twenty-two Sam walked out, bound for college, and their dad took off leaving Dean with a set of car keys and the decision of who to follow.
He chose to throw himself against the monsters of this world. He did that by trusting his dad enough to follow orders and chose to believe his dad knew what he was doing.
{Alastair's Apprentice} God, Dean hated that one. Dean was so incredibly sick of this one being thrown in his face, too. Yes, he had earned the title while Downstairs; so no, he couldn't argue it was his. As much as he might wish it were otherwise. Never, for the rest of his life, will the phrase "sign me up" ever cross his lips again. That moment remained one of the biggest regrets of his life.
The worst part? The part he didn't like to admit? If he had to, he would be every bit as good now as he was then. After seeing what that British bitch did to Sammy, he was disturbingly tempted to brush off some of those skills. Ice water, sharp knife, and a blowtorch? Please. But, no. He wasn't going there. Not again, not ever. He may have won himself the nickname years ago, but he was not that man anymore.
He was only Alastair's pet project because the God Squad singled him out as{The Righteous Man} who was destined to spill blood in Hell. The irony of that was not lost on him. If he had held out, if had stuck with his "shove it where the sun shines," then those Dicks with Wings would have left him there to rot. If he had truly been a righteous man, he'd still be there: on the rack and screaming. If he was lucky, he'd be ripped apart and reduced to nothing; his soul destroyed. Most likely, he would've been turned into a black-eyed bastard. Where would their "Righteous Man" be then, huh?
Not starting the apocalypse, that's for damned sure.
What does being 'righteous' even mean, anyway? He'd looked up the dictionary definition, way back when: acting in accord with divine or moral law; justifiable. Justifiable. Once, Dean thought all the lying and stealing and sleeping around was balanced out by all the people he saved. By did saving people really justify all that? Sometimes he wondered.
Acting in accord with divine law sure sounded like the Righteous Man would also be a {True Servant of Heaven}. The only one who could have killed the Whore of Babylon was a True Servant of Heaven. Him. Dean snorted into his beer. True Servant of Heaven my ass, he thought. He proved that one wrong. One, he served nobody since his dad died; he was his own man. Two, Servants of Heaven don't go around around icing asshole angels. Yeah, Zachariah, I'm talking to you.
Then came {The Micheal Sword}. Turns out he had been born and bred for that, literally. Freaking cupids put his parents together. He still wasn't sure he'd ever tell his mom that one: Hey by the way Mom, remember how you couldn't even stand Dad at first? Yeah, that changed because some ass-hate angel put the whammy on you two. See, they needed the Lucifer line Campbells and the Micheal line Winchesters to breed. What? Yeah, your side of the family is a great fit for the Devil himself. Try not to dwell on it. It's not like Lucifer is loose on the world again. Oh, wait...
Well, that breeding program flopped. God Squad needed their Big Yes. So they pulled strings and built the most stubborn man they possibly could?
Dean sometimes wondered if heaven and hell had left them alone, not killed their mom, not killed Jess... If they had never become Hunters... If Sam and him didn't know the score... Would they still have had the grit and the stubbornness to keep saying 'No' to their respective archangels? Adam had a lot of the same genetics, but no understanding when he said 'Yes.'
Poor freakin' Adam, man. That guy really got the shaft on that one.
Then came Lisa's {Tough Guy}; his first endearment since Buddy. Water stood in Dean's eye as he remembered all of the sweet little murmurs of "Come here, Tough Guy, I've got you," in the middle of a nightmare laced sleep. When a man shows up on a woman's door already completely wrecked and wishing that he'd died, there's no point pretending he was okay. Lisa, amazing Lisa, knew just how to handle him and did an outstanding job of putting what pieces were left of him back together. She knew how important his image of bad ass loner had been. Gently, she had teased out the man inside the hollowed out shell.
He chuckled as he remembered her laughingly punching his arm as he joked around with her during the day. "So that's the way its gonna be, is it? Huh, Tough Guy? Let's see how tough you are when I donate that pie in the oven to Ben's bake sale. Not so tough now, are you?"
She let him cry and she made him laugh knowing he'd need both to heal.
In the end, it wasn't meant to be. Dean had always, would always, choose Sam. Doesn't mean Dean wouldn't miss what he once had in the Braden home.
In Purgatory, every bottom feeder far and wide came to know him as {The Human}. He was a living, breathing human in a hell dimension full of monsters. Everything wanted a piece of him, but almost no one knew his name. There? Didn't need one. Part of it was almost nice, not having to be be anything for anybody. No names to live up to, no titles to live down; in Purgatory there was only survival.
Funny. He spent a year as The Human, but he had never been so feral in his existence. Benny once called him a killing machine after a particularly brutal bout of survival. In all that bloody fighting, Dean only held on to his humanity because he had a friend to find and rescue. Dean can admit he needed that goal, that end game, or he would have lost himself in the kill or be killed mentality of the dimension. Once again Cas saved him just by being Cas; and the angel probably doesn't even realize it.
{Squirrel}. Dean still wasn't exactly sure why the nickname Moose stuck with Sam out of all the insulting labels Crowley spat at them. Gigantor. Jolly Green. Sasquatch. Giraffe. Those Dean could understand. Why Moose? Maybe its a demon thing. After all, Meg got it.
Why did a demon get to make Sam's nickname (and by extension, Dean's), anyway? Okay, admittedly, Crowley was the walking definition of 'frenemy.' By all rights as Hunters, they really should have killed the demon years ago. He was a monster, a killer, and he never made any secret of the fact or made any excuses. But Cain called it. If they did gank the bastard, Dean would feel oddly conflicted about it. They all knew each other too well these days.
Mot recently, he'd been called{Knight of Hell}. That... that had been weird. For the first time since he was five years old he'd had absolutely no responsibilities. To anyone. Part of him reveled in that freedom. But while he'd been a demon, he'd also been himself. He'd been a hunter and a killer of evil since before double digits. As a demon, he'd just been a killer. Dean had pointed himself at other demons for the most part because killing them didn't cause that bizarre imbalance of old and new, human morality and the Mark's need to murder. That conflict inside his own soul would have driven him nuts, so he kept himself away.
It worked. Until his brother came for him, anyway. Pushed him right over the edge, Sam did. "Right now I'm doing all I can not to come over there and rip your throat out. With my teeth." Sam always could push his buttons. Universal constant of little brothers, Dean supposed. Sammy pushed him over the edge and brought him back again, first through a miserable night of needles and then through a spell to end all spells. He really came through for him.
They were brothers again.
And now Chuck, God himself with a capital G, called him {The Firewall}.
"That's why I saved you years ago... You're the firewall between light and darkness."
"No! No..."
Dean wanted to refuse the name, he wanted to refuse the responsibility. Just once he wanted a job that wasn't so big and seemingly beyond him.
"Look, give me a-a vampire, and I'm good. But this- God's sister? That's way above my pay grade."
But it wasn't, was it? In the end, he talked Amara down. Saved all of freakin' Creation.
Dean realized that 'Firewall' wasn't anything new for him. Not really. Hadn't the family Winchester being doing the job his entire life? Saving people, Hunting things. Stopping the monsters so that other families didn't have to go through the same hell they did. Yes, the monsters kept getting bigger and badder and more freakish than ever. But they all eventually went down.
It was a lot to deal with, these last few days, the last few years, these last few decades.
But he was Dean Freakin' Winchester. No matter what nickname you called him, the result was the same. Mess with his family or his planet, he'd come for you. And he'd find a way to win.