AN: Ok, this is for quickreaver's print raffle, which she posted about on her blog. It was inspired by the print, and I ah, got very carried away...so here it is. #fuckyeahSamMoL

WARNINGS: Abuse, strong language, war, violence. If any of these bother you, please do not read. I don't want to upset anyone.

DISCLAIMER: Don't own the boys, the show, or the print. What I do own are my original ideas and plotlines, so please don't nick those. As for Sammy, meh, I can share...

THIS IS AN AU, FROM PRE-SEASON 1 ONWARDS. IT WILL PARALLEL WITH THE SHOW AT CERTAIN POINTS, BUT ALWAYS REMAIN AU. (Just in case anyone gets confused.)

Enjoy! (?)

It really shouldn't have surprised anyone when child protection got involved. John Winchester had disappeared after his wife had died in a fire: an inexplicable fire, a fire that, in spite of the lack of evidence, and apparent explanation of a gas leak, never quite made sense as an accident. Not, at least, to Officer William Cole.

Twenty Eight years later, and some part of Sam still hated that police officer.

They were in Evansville, Indiana. John was away, and Sam didn't remember why. His brother, of whom he had only the most fleeting impression of a smile, and freckles, was not there either. When the police broke the door down, four year old Sam was alone.

He'd been fast asleep on the floor, in a small pile of ratty blankets, next to an empty baby bottle. His little body was lying in the centre of some kind of pentagram, spray painted onto the floor, and a thick circle of salt. Herbs associated in folklore with witchcraft and spirits were scattered around the room, and a brief search revealed files full of articles on missing persons and devils.

However much it pissed him off, Sam couldn't say he'd have acted any differently. The police took him into custody, and after they were unable to locate his father or his brother, he was sent into care. One month later, a carer in the home Sam was sent to received a phone call from a young boy, who insisted on speaking to 'Sammy' before being cut off by an older man. The woman, a Miss Elizabeth Wood, tried to call back, but the phone was switched off. She informed the police, and they tried to trace the cell, but the phone was deactivated, and they never found it.

Six months after Sam got into foster care, he received a letter. It was taped to the windowsill next to his bed, wrapped in a local newspaper with his name printed on it. His father had used plain white paper, the kind you put into printers and buy by the batch. It was written in black biro, in awkward, rounded capitals. It read as follows.

'Sam,

I'm sorry we left you. We both miss you more than I can say. But I think this is best. You're safe. You've escaped this life before you even had to begin it. I think Mary would have wanted that. Dean is too old, he's seen too much. But you have a chance.

I'm sorry kiddo, it'll be a long time before you understand this. I'm sorry I can't say more. But I'm thinking of you here. Of your mother.

I'll always love you Sammy. Always.

Daddy.'

By this point, five year old Sam had learnt not to trust all of the children at 's House, and even of the men and women who acted as his guardians he was wary. There was some sense of warning, of danger, still lingering fuzzily at the back of his thoughts that made him cautious of everybody around him.

Of course, the workers noticed and threw around words like 'abuse', 'neglect', words inked neatly into the beginning of his file in between suppositions about the 'suspicious circumstances' concerning his mother and absent father. Concern for his brother makes an appearance here, but only briefly, and Dean does not come up again.

So the letter Sam kept to himself, in spite of a desperate wish for someone to read it. Even before he was familiar with its contents, even before every word was seared behind his eyelids, dancing a reel around his mind every night before he went to sleep, Sam knew it was important.

This timeline of events. The paper, the newspaper it was wrapped in. The motel room, the devil worship, the salt - the phone call and his father's message. A blurred memory of a big man in a dark coat, and a brother made of freckles and a smile and sunlight. These were what Sam had of himself as a Winchester. These were his roots. The rest was what he became.

11 months and two weeks after being put into care, Sam was adopted by Gene and Maria Hadley. This was when the abuse started. It was also when he lost his name.

One week after arriving at 3 Orchard Road, cradling a twisted wrist and bleeding profusely from his nose and mouth, Sam was informed in no uncertain terms that his name was Filth, and that he had no family.

The five year old Winchester had cried quietly and nodded. He hadn't needed to be told the second part.

The abuse was physical and verbal, with a dose of neglect on the side, just to be safe. Sam became another name who slipped through the system. He didn't go to school.

He was trapped. Too little to know what to do, he did his best to do Gene and Maria's bidding, or, as they perversely preferred, 'Mummy and Daddy'.

He did try to escape, at first forming little more in his young mind than a need to get away, and a break for it through the garden. He failed, and earned a scar that ran from his right shoulder to his left hip for the trouble. At seven years old, Sam was malnourished and frightened of everything. He flinched at birdsong. He did not speak. He was a ghost in a window at the new neighbour's house, and nothing more.

When Sam was eight, the police visited the Hadley's, after an anonymous informant had called into the station, worried about screams they had heard coming from the house, and a child they had seen mowing the lawn.

Sam was hurriedly dressed in his best clothes - those that he had arrived in, and not worn since. He was made up by Maria to cover the bruises, sticky creams and powders tickling his skin. And then he was presented, as a shy, quiet, thin but healthy child. Sam did as he was told, and though they had their reservations, the officers accepted his story. The police did not, on Gene and Maria's open display of the child, search the house. If they had, they may have been shocked by the mess of soiled towels and ripped clothes that made Sam's bed, by the beer bottles bursting uncontrollably from the trash, by the tiny store of crisps Sam kept in the corner of his 'nest'. By the blood stains in the dining room he hadn't been able to remove from the carpet. Instead, however, their suspicions were allayed, and Sam was lost.

It was at this point that Gene and Maria realised how close they were to losing their source of income, stress release and free labour. It was at this point, under a pretense of normality, that they let Sam go to school.

His first day at school was an experience Sam would never forget. For one thing, it was terrifying. Huge and busy and loud and bright. People stared at his old clothes, his bony hands, his short, choppy hair (roughly cut with a razor by Maria the day before). People called him Sam, and after three years it took him a minute or so each time to realise that yes, that was him. That was his name. He kept himself to himself, and managed largely to slip under the radar of any bullies. The few that did bump into him once or twice found nothing interesting in his simple apathy to their violence, and soon let him be.

And then there was learning. There were books, and lessons, and history and maths and science. At a severe disadvantage, his teachers worried that he had some kind of learning difficulty, or was otherwise mentally incapacitated. It wasn't long before they discovered the very opposite was true. In spite of the years Sam had missed, he caught up in a matter of months, and soon began moving ahead of his classmates.

Though Gene and Maria whined about the time they were losing, about Filth slacking off from his duties at home, they loved the attention they received from his teachers, the praise and admiration for 'their' child. It wasn't long before they began attending school events, and socializing with the other parents. They liked the opportunity to show off, to control their 'son' in public, to manipulate him in the evenings after by pointing out how friendly the other parents were – how they approved of the Hadley's parenting skills, how they liked them.

It made Sam even more quiet than he had been before, and utterly detached from everyone around him. There were one or two offers of friendship from his classmates, but these soon fell against Sam's single minded ignorance of them. Soon, he had exactly what he wanted, no one close enough to hurt him beyond the Hadleys. He was desperately lonely. Time passed. And passed. And passed.

Some mornings, Sam woke, and he didn't feel frightened, or upset, angry or hurt any more. He just felt tired. He did his best to throw himself into his studies, and developed the ability to separate himself from his home life. He simply took it.

One night, when the Hadleys were out and he was twelve, he considered burning the letter from his father. The one material link to his real family, the father who'd abandoned him. The brother, who in spite of the now well faded memory of warmth and light and smiles and safety had left him to this.

Sometimes Sam tried to fight back. He was certainly building up a store of anger he had nothing to do with. Whenever he fought Gene, he inevitably came out worse. At thirteen, he was gangly and awkward in his body, but even without the physical disadvantage, Gene would always have won. The abuse had been going on too long, it was too deeply ingrained into Sam's instincts, his earliest memories. He'd manage one punch in a burst of anger, and then he'd simply freeze in instinctive and utter terror. Gene didn't need to hit him for it to happen either, and the man knew it. He just had to be close, and Sam's whole body would lock.

So he started martial arts. Basketball. Football. He did it all under cover, having learnt long ago how to hide anything that gave him pleasure from Maria, who had once burned all of his books in a jealous rage against his 'happiness'. Sam hadn't known whether to laugh or cry, and instead he'd just knelt numbly in the garden, red fingers sifting through the crumbling ash of his studies.

But Sam stayed alone. Time went on, and he was simply too frightened to be friends with anyone. He became rebellious, surly, rude. He spoke little, and what he did say was almost always a nettle. He got stronger, faster, more graceful within his gangly limbs, and his Jujitsu instructor often commented on his natural talent and stubborn focus. (Sam never replied, never spoke to him, but Harry Kyu was the closest thing he had to a friend.) He kept well away from guns, unsure how he would bear the temptation.

He became more and more obsessed with his studies, and when he wasn't doing sport or working out, he spent all his free time at school doing extra classes, extra assignments, anything he could find.

But he was alone. In spite of his teams and his classes and his teachers, all of whom gave him chance on chance, offered a forest of olive branches and a flock of metaphorical doves, he kept away. He hid the bruises Gene largely left where they wouldn't be seen. He shoplifted food and managed to stay at a weight that was just below healthy. By fourteen, he was beyond exhausted.

There was simply nothing left of his mind beyond work and exercise and home and pain. Sam stopped speaking altogether. He barely made it into school. Gene and Maria, sensing the change, got more and more brutal, especially when Sam's teachers called them to find out why he'd been missing class. Sam became a walking coma, taking every beating and not batting an eyelash. He stopped sleeping. (He never burned the letter).

It shouldn't have been a surprise when Sam tried to commit suicide. But then, when a fourteen year old throws himself off a building, it's difficult to stay apathetic.