Notes: This is my shiny, happy universe where I am Boss. We'll call it a small sidestep of an AU. Also, this is technically Gen, but also technically pre-slash - you can read it as either without issues, as I've tried to keep my 'shipping as quiet as possible (right up 'til the end where it will smash you with a mallet to the face).

Story will be in three parts. Or four... if my inspiration decides to return at the last second.

Fourteen miles down the road he appeared out of thin air on the back seat, coughing blood. It was a wonder he has any blood left to cough up. It stained his shirts – front and back, oozing from the gaping wound in his chest.

Some force of instinct prompted Dean to slam his foot down on the brake pedal, the car screeching to a sudden stop in the middle of the road, two long lines of black, burnt rubber left behind. The archangel in the back seat slammed back against the leather, spat more blood, and lost consciousness. He slithered to the side, came to a stop mashed up against the door in a boneless slump that could never be achieved by someone who was faking it. Dean looked at Sam, saw the look of gobsmacked 'what the fuck' he's sure is on his own face mirrored right back at him.

"Dude," Sam actually said it as they both twist and turn to look over the back of the front seat, "what the fuck?"

Dean shook his head. "I got nothing," he admitted. "I got less than nothing."

"We can't just do nothing. The guy was willing to die for us, Dean."

Practically had, suicidal attempt at fratricide and all. The only indication that Gabriel was still alive and kicking was the blood still slowly oozing from his chest, and the lack of burnt-out wings fanning out from his body in sooty patterns on the car interior.

"Dean," Sam prompted again.

"Alright, ok. I'm thinking." He actually wasn't, still stuck on 'holy shit, he's not dead' and 'what the hell do I do with a half-dead archangel' (and also a tiny little voice that was screaming 'he's getting blood all over my baby!'). "What the hell do we do with a half-dead archangel?" Dean repeated the thought aloud, running a hand over the bottom half of his face. In the shock of it he didn't even remember that he was currently parked in the middle of a deserted highway.

"I don't know," Sam replied, clearly in no better state than he was. "Uh... Maybe we should get him to a motel?"

"Yeah. I really want to go to one of those again so soon."

"Do you have a better idea? Because I'm open to suggestions here."

"Ok... ok..." Dean couldn't think of anything better. "But if the next place we stop at includes a party of homicidal nutjobs we're buying a goddamn tent."

The next motel did not actually include any homicidal nutjobs. It did however have a sign outside that boasted free wireless and a mini-fridge stocked with complimentary soda. It did not have any available rooms with three beds. Sam sucked it up and checked them into a pair of queens, reasoning that he could always rock-paper-scissors Dean into sleeping on the floor.

In the two hours it had taken them to find the motel Gabriel hadn't shown any improvement. He came around just a bit when the brothers levered him out of the back seat, just long enough to voice a pained grunt, then fell back into complete unconsciousness as he was manhandled into the motel room.

For once the decor seemed to fit the mood, utilitarian, sombre rather than flashy. Sam was glad of it as he wiped tacky blood from his hands and sat down at the table with his laptop. He had no idea what he was doing, what he was looking for, but running a few basic searches was better than sitting there and doing nothing.

He opened the laptop and almost immediately the autoplay began, reminding him of the DVD still in the drive. Sam quickly ejected the disc and pushed it to the side. The disc was just more proof of why they should be helping the archangel, but that didn't mean he actually wanted to see what happened next. For all he knew it was mutable, would play differently every time – frankly he didn't want to find out.

Dean sat down on the other bed, the one that wasn't covered in aching, bleeding archangel, and glanced over at his brother. "You know, I used to think our lives were pretty weird as it was."

"What's weird about this?" Sam asked dryly. "We're only holed up in yet another crappy motel right in the middle of the end of the world, with a half-dead archangel who starred in his very own porno."

Despite himself Dean couldn't help but grin. "I kinda like how you just left out the whole running from Lucifer, kidnapped by pagan gods, gotta-catch-'em-all stuff."

Sam was silent for a moment. "Our lives are pretty damn weird."

"Anyway," Dean looked at the other bed and the crumpled, bloody figure on top of the covers. "At least we've got someone else on our side. Someone not dead."

"Yet."

"Yeah... yet."

In the end the best they can come up with is cleaning the wound. Dean cut the sticky, bloody shirt right down the middle, ripping the cotton through with the edge of a hunting knife while Sam looked through their sorely depleted first aid kit for clean gauze and liquid antiseptic.

It seemed weird and ridiculous to use antiseptic on an angel, but neither of them knew exactly what a stab-wound from an archangel's knife would do. The idea of a chest wound going septic, no matter what amazing healing powers archangels may or may not have, was not a good thing whatever species you happened to be.

Of course, once they'd started it seemed stupid not to finish the job. They used towels and water from the bathroom to clean the blood from Gabriel's skin, used Dean's knife to strip the rest of the ruined clothing from Gabriel's torso. Naked from the waist up the archangel looked too small and too fragile. The gauze pads Sam taped in place on top of the knife-wound and its exit point only made it look worse.

Taking the sudden down-time as an opportunity for research, Sam called Bobby and filled him in on the details of their new plan. At least the 'find the horsemen' part of it, the other part he didn't trust over the phone. He doubted that Lucifer was tapping phones, but sometimes it was better to be paranoid than dead.

The phrase 'better to be paranoid than dead' stuck in his head, repeating like a mantra. He wondered if that was what Gabriel used to think.

And since Gabriel was still alive, even if it was barely, Sam wondered if he still felt the same way.

When Gabriel came to for the first time only six hours later he found himself half-naked, on a stiff motel mattress and covered by a thick woollen blanket. The ceiling was incredibly boring, so he turned his head to the side to see an unmade bed. Just that small movement sent sparks of pain shooting through him.

A groan fell from his lips without his consent, and he blacked out for just a moment. When he forced his eyes open again he was looking right into the face of one of the Winchesters.

"What are you looking at?" Gabriel wheezed.

"Just checking to make sure you're still kicking," Dean replied, and pressed his palm, then the back of his hand, to Gabriel's forehead briefly. "You actually had a fever a couple of hours ago, it was pretty freaky."

"'Fraidy cat."

"You know, you're pretty mouthy for a dead guy."

"Don't you know?" Gabriel asked. He closed his eyes and suppressed a less than healthy cough, dredging up as much of a cheery tone as being three-quarters-dead would allow. "It'll take more than a little stabbing to kill me. I'm the zombie king of the undead angel legion."

"Whatever, your highness..." Dean was quiet for a moment. Then he added in a much softer tone; "Thanks. For, you know..."

"Attempted suicide? Don't mention it. Ever."

"Sure, whatever you say. But just between you and me, you suck at dying."

Gabriel's lips quirked upwards a little at that, but he'd already exerted himself too much. He sank back into unconsciousness, a slow slide that numbed some of the pain that throbbed at his core. He was alive, if not intact, and that was a whole lot better than he'd expected.

By the end of the week Gabriel was on the road to recovery. He peeked under the bandage taped to his chest to see how bad the damage was, and even with a week of healing the wound was still open and wet. He had a feeling it would never heal entirely, but whether the wound itself was permanent or whether it would just leave a nasty scar was nothing more than mystery. Gabriel had never heard of anyone, or anything, surviving a stab to the chest with an archangel's sword. His own survival was a small miracle that came down to milliseconds of timing. Just a heartbeat longer and he wouldn't have had a heartbeat at all.

His grace was severely diminished, his own blade missing. And he had a gaping, oozing wound right in the middle of his chest. Wonderful.

He sat propped up by pillows, leaning against the headboard. And as if that weren't enough of an indignity he was also dressed in a hoodie that had once belonged to Sam and thus needed to have the sleeves rolled up several inches just so he could find his hands in the masses of fabric. It was like wearing some new-age adaptation of a monk's robes, and Gabriel was not impressed with it. (Nor was he impressed with the fact that the brothers had played a very heated game of poker to decide which one of them would be giving up clothes. But he would rather pretend that had never happened than mention it and clue them in to the fact that yes, he had actually been awake to hear the debate.)

It was depressing to find himself unable to speed up his own recovery beyond a dulling of the pain. More so to find that he was incapable of just snapping his fingers and rearranging the world around him. If he wanted the damn TV remote he actually had to ask, for chrissakes. Several millennia of just doing whatever the hell he wanted, whenever he wanted, and he was now reduced to actually asking for the remote.

In a stroke of something that wasn't quite irony he found that the most depressing thing about his current condition was the fact that he was obviously a burden. He was slowing the Winchesters down, preventing them from moving on to the next hunt, from hunting down the next horseman and coming up with the next sheer-dumb-luck-saves-them plan.

"Look," he said (over the faint background noise of Cheryl telling Marco that it was Over between them), "you might as well just get your fluffy little tails in gear and speed on out of here. This is as good as it's going to get for now, kiddies. Forget the miracle-cure and get back on track."

He could tell just by the guilty look on Sam's face as the brothers exchanged looks that he'd hit at least somewhere close to the mark. It was harder to tell now, of course, when he couldn't just poke through their minds on a whim without losing the numbness that kept the gaping wound in his chest from shooting pain through his being.

"We have no idea what you're talking about." Sam said, just a hint of guilt hiding in the corner of his mouth.

Gabriel rolled his eyes. "I'm slowing you down, you two slowpokes should have been half way to Tatooine by now, getting ready to take on the hutt."

"Actually, we're enjoying the break."

"Oh," Gabriel looked at Dean, eyebrows raised, "so you actually like sleeping on the floor then. My mistake."

"We were going to wait," Sam interrupts, just half a beat before Dean can open his mouth for a retort. Sam was always the honest one. "Until you could travel with us. Until you were better."

The archangel chuckled and the vibrations from the sound sent spirals and flutters of pain radiating out from his chest right down to the tips of his fingers. His lips twisted into a sarcastic smirk as, for the first time in a long while, he told the plain and honest truth; "Newsflash, boys. It's not getting any better than this."

"But you're healing," Sam protested.

"As a human." It hurt just to say the words, but Gabriel forced them out with a sardonic smile and a playful drawl. "My vessel is healing, but it's healing slow. My grace still has a whopping great hole right through the middle of it and that isn't just going to go away. I'm diminished. I'm as threatening to Lucifer as a piece of cheese to a mouse and just about as useful."

"What happened to being the zombie king of the undead angel legion?" Dean asked, just as dry.

"I said that?"

"You also suggested declaring yourself Christ and showing off the hole in your chest as 'stigmata'."

"... I talk a lot of shit. Point is you boys need to be moving along."

Dean didn't seem to have an immediate answer for that, which only gave Sam time to jump in again with his cow-eyes and creepily effective earnestness. "We're not leaving you behind. Gabriel, you saved us back there, you practically died helping us out. Sticking with you until you're healed is the least we can do."

Gabriel really hated those damn eyes. He sighed, raised both of his hands and let them drop again in a nonverbal 'what the hell'. "Well then strap me in and tie me down, boys."

"Sorry?"

"I'm not staying here," Gabriel said, using small, simple words to get his point across, "and you've made it clear you're not leaving without me. So strap me into the back seat and let's go."

Sam looked at Dean, and Dean looked at Gabriel, then back at his brother. He sighed. "Whatever, man." He pointed a threatening index finger at the archangel on the bed. "But if you throw up on my leather seats, you're toast."

"Hey, Dean. Eat me."

"Bite me, shorty."