At first he'd left the dvd in the computer. Because Gabriel had told Dean to guard it with his life, and to Dean that meant "give it to Sam to keep track of." It wasn't like there was anywhere safer for it, and they didn't have a great track record for keeping things in one piece.

Sam still wasn't sure how he felt about the whole thing, except that everything about it felt wrong.

There was a small, angry part of him that said if anyone was going to get to kill Gabriel, it should have been him. He was the one who'd put six months of work into following him, hunting him across the country. He was the one who'd been shot -- he still had the scar, even, a bizarre souvenir of his six months out of time. If Sam had killed him, it would have meant something. Lucifer just snuffed him out, like he was nothing, like it wasn't personal at all.

Then there was the fact that it seemed a shame that they'd had an archangel on their side (however briefly), and all he'd managed to do was get himself killed. Sure, he'd saved them from Lucifer for another few weeks, and given them the information about the rings -- okay, that had been helpful -- but it wasn't like he couldn't have shared that information without dying. It was a waste, that was all.

And then there was the part of him that just felt bad. The archangel Gabriel had been gone from Heaven for a long time; no one there would come looking for him. No one was going to send flowers, or get their feathers all ruffled (or whatever angels did); they didn't even know he was more gone than before. It just seemed like -- someone should remember.

There was even a tiny, miniscule part of him that couldn't help wondering if Gabriel's "guard this with your life" had been something more than just one more trick on the Winchesters. Maybe there was a reason he wanted them to keep the dvd; maybe he had one more trick up his sleeve. Maybe his last ditch "I'm on the side of humanity" was enough to get him the free pass Castiel seemed to have with God, and he'd be back smirking at them in one piece. Stabbed with a sword couldn't be worse than exploding, right?

So he left the dvd in the drive. He even watched it through to the end, just in case there was another message anywhere (there wasn't). And then they were a little busy with everything else that happened, and he wasn't thrilled to find out that Dean had left his computer stashed in the car along with the rest of his stuff, but everything booted up fine.

He had to take the dvd out when it started auto-playing on startup. The computer didn't even have an autoplay feature, and after another embarassing "no ma'am, that's not a pornographic dvd playing, it must be your imagination" explanation, he bought a cheap plastic case and tucked the dvd in his duffel.

**********

"Dude, I can't believe you bought a pink case for that thing."

"What?"

Dean swore up and down it wasn't a prank. Sam swore up and down he'd bought a clear case. Nevertheless, it was very obviously in a pink case when they looked at it.

"Huh. Well, that's weird." But in the grand scheme of how weird their lives had been for the last forever, it was pretty easy to let it go.

And then the dvd transformed into an ipod. Not even a good ipod; it was a shuffle. A shuffle with no headphones. The ipod wasn't pink, but it did sparkle. He felt ridiculous charging it, and even more ridiculous when it turned out to be empty. Dean had put money on it being a post-life trick from Gabriel just to screw around with them. Sam hadn't entirely abandoned the idea that it was all a prank by Dean to get over the awkward "sorry I did crappy things while I was possessed by the devil" phase of their reunion.

Two days later, the shuffle was a nano. (Still empty, although Sam dutifully charged it again.) Three days after that, Sam opened his duffle to a netbook. It looked like a netbook, at least. He wasn't sure you could really call it that if it didn't connect to the internet. It booted, though, to a DOS-prompt cursor on a blank screen. He stared at it for a long time.

Finally, he typed, 'hello?'

Of course nothing happened. He wasn't sure why he'd expected anything different. On a whim, he added, 'gabriel, if you're in there, speak up. apocalypse averted.' He hesitated, fingers twitching over the keys, and finished with, 'this is sam winchester.' If it was Gabriel (and they had no real evidence one way or another, except that it seemed more likely to be Gabriel than anything else) there was no way of knowing how much awareness he had of the outside world.

HEY SAM

The words typed themselves into existence on the screen one letter at a time. Only the knowledge that they'd already tested the device for every kind of demonic influence they could think of kept Sam from dropping it.

'hey gabriel,' he typed. This was going to be interesting.

*************

Note: Gabriel the netbook makes a followup appearance in Ex-Spooks, Guns, and Money (send them all, there's a party in Miami).