Work Text:
Dean Winchester knew not what he did when he renamed Castiel.
How could he? To Winchesters in particular, names are fluid, changeable things. What’s in a name? Whatever you need, baby. Aliases, alibis, access. The Winchester boys grow a new name every time a case demands it, every time they roll into a new town. And they do it as quickly and easily as breathing. Even their given names come with wiggle room: “Samuel” becomes “Sam” becomes “Sammy”, or even “Samantha” if Dean is in a certain mood. Sometimes they forgo names entirely; “jerk” and “bitch” are not interchangeable. The car has a name, the guns do not; “Dad” is often “sir”, and “Mom” is often left unsaid, too sacred to utter.
As in everything else, names, for the Winchesters, are chaos incarnate.
This is not so for angels.
The name “Castiel” is only his in a tangential, watered-down sense: human language is limited, and angelic names are beyond comprehension in much the same way as their voices and forms. Were Castiel to speak his true name to a human, they would go deaf.
That is the best case scenario. The worst case is that their brain crisps to ash inside their skull.
Still, the human translation has something holy in it. The suffix of Castiel’s name marks him as “of God”: he is Heaven’s soldier, one of God’s many hands. He wields the will of the Lord and enacts His edicts. (Or at least, the edicts of his superiors.) He obeys. This is what angels do.
Any other angel would have refused a nickname. “Address me by the name I have been given,” they would say, cold and untouchable. “None other will do.”
Castiel, on the other hand, accepts his rechristening without comment.
He only realizes what it truly means when he hears the nickname fall from Uriel’s traitorous mouth. It is profane and offensive, but not in the way it should be. That is not yours, Castiel thinks instinctively. That is Dean’s. That is Sam’s.
It is then that he realizes how far gone he is.
So you’ve let this speck of dust cast the “-iel” from your name, Uriel’s cruel grin and glittering eyes say. You are not “of God”. You are of Dean Winchester, now. You have tossed aside what is right and holy for the sake of the Righteous Man.
Or perhaps that is just Castiel’s own internal monologue. Whatever the origin, he cannot find it within himself to refute it in the moment.
He tries, later. In the aftermath of that day a beaten, bloodied Dean lying in a hospital bed tells him, “I can’t do it, Cas.”
Castiel pretends it means nothing. He pretends that the cracked, despairing sound of the Righteous Man’s voice does not make him wish to flood him with Grace as he did in Hell, to cradle him close and heal his wounds. To shelter him. To keep him safe.
(To hear him say that name again, and again, and again, and again. Whispered, laughed, sighed, shouted. In gladness, in anger, in lo—)
He tells himself he does not want those things.
He is lying.
What’s in a name?
The death of the old self. The birth of the new.
So live not in the ashes of the past; shed your old name like snakeskin, leave it dusty and discarded in the path behind you. It will only chafe and itch if you do not.
Shed your old name and take your new one in both hands. Take it in both hands, and start again.