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Sawyer is a lot cleaner nowadays than he used to be, living as he does in the back room of a church, he tries to not spoil the environment. He carries no stink about him, but he does tend to still have the shabby look of someone who has spent years living on the street and a lot of people assume he is still a bum if they see him and don't know better. He touts a long baggy jacket with ample room for hiding a short shotgun like the Kel Tec he got after receiving his first bounty. Sawyer is an extremely humble man having long lost any sense of self worth, and his body language reflects this.
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Tom Sawyer's birth mother had loved him dearly, sowing well the seeds of empathy and goodness before she tragically (and mysteriously) died when he was only three years old, with no relatives known alive. He found himself part of the foster care system, the bad part. Tom Sawyer is not a good name when you grow up in foster care. Even if one group of kids will leave you alone, it's a fair bet that when you get moved, there will be hell to pay. Tom learned to use only the name of Sawyer.
It was for the most part a pretty miserable existence getting foisted off on people whose only reason for caring was that they got a small check from the government for it. Corporal punishment was a daily routine for most of his childhood. Sawyer's only good memories of childhood was a solitary year in his early teens where he was cared for by a decent fellow who lived country ways. He and Sawyer would spend at least a couple days a week out duck hunting and skeet shooting. But when that one decent fellow up and died on him after only a year, Sawyer found himself too old for standard foster care and dumped in a dirt cheap boy's school run by some odd priesthood.
Sawyer was hurting something fierce when they took him in, and the faith they proffered was hard to resist. It did not take long for him to find solace in it, and a few years later he went on to seminary school. He did not at the end feel temperamentally suited for the priesthood, not being comfortable with the deferentially with which priests were treated, at least not if it was going to be him so treated. Instead after the seminary, he volunteered with a religious NGO doing relief work in some of the worst places in the world.
That was a mistake. Sawyer's faith was already made fragile from what he learned in the seminary; he was not impressed with the origins of the doctrine most everyone else took so seriously. But when he was exposed through relief work to the true horror and tragedy of some of human existence, his faith broke. He turned to drink.
He hung on for the longest time with the NGO despite his drink, as he had a knack for medical work. Finally though, a serious mishap that could have killed people due to his drinking got him fired from the job while in the middle of war torn Sudan. He somehow made it to the coast and found his way onto the crew of a tramp freighter, working for not much more than food and lodging. That didn't last long as they caught him raiding the stores for booze, and kicked him off ship. It was great fortune it wasn't off in some other backwater of the world, but instead back in the US.
There he languished on skid row for many years, sometimes doing day work if he could get it, pan handling if he couldn't, helping at the soup kitchens so he didn't feel so much like a free loader. He got pretty good at scrounging for the necessities, finding good places to sleep and good sources of whatever drink or drugs could be got for dirt cheap. He wasn't a bad guy, but you wouldn't know it to look at him anymore. He got well known in that world, somehow surviving the years when so many others did not.
He also started to clue in to the fact that something was amiss with the world. People would go missing in ways that the rest of the world seemed oblivious to, and it happened far too regularly and far too often to the folks on skid row for Sawyer to not be painfully aware.
Despite all the hardship and heartache Sawyer had lived with his whole life, despite the dregs of his life he had left himself in, there remained in him a spark none the less. Good works, even if there is no justice, no reward in the end, doing good for no other reason than doing good was still something Sawyer believed in, even if there wasn't much left that he could do given his current state. So when he had reason to believe something wrong was happening in a part of town where homeless families had taken shelter, he found himself snooping about.
Something was very wrong indeed. Gunshots echoed in the dark among the abandoned warehouses. Roars that were anything but human filled the spaces, punctuated with screams that definitely were. Despite his fear, Sawyer could not help but run towards the screams.
He tripped and fell, his face fall being broken by the guts of the body he had tripped over. He froze in horror at the sight. More screams, another roar and something moved just out of his sight. And then his hand found itself on the shotgun of the dead hunter he had fallen over. Pure instinct had him check the weapon, a bag of shells found itself over his shoulder as his eyes looked for that shadow. Without volition, just instinct, he prayed.
Again the shadow. He prayed harder as he strained for sight. And then with a roar, the shadow charged him! Sawyer was good with a shotgun, his body remembered. A first blast stopped the charge, a second put whatever it was down, a third with the barrel to it's head finished it.
Silence. He could not hear his own prayers though his lips and voice gave them words.
And then another roar, further away, and more screams. Sawyer ran towards the screams, adding shells to the shotgun as he went. Another shadow. Sawyer screamed a challenge and the shadow charged. Sawyer fired. He fired again, then again. It was down, Sawyer reloaded and kept moving.
More shadows, more firing, more screams he had not yet found the source of. Sawyer was praying with a loud voice, proclaiming the wrath of God in his hands. And then he saw it, he saw what his long lost faith needed to reawaken with a vengeance. He saw Father Jacob surrounded in a halo of light, praying almost peacefully. He saw the innocent huddled about him being protected in that light. He saw the hand of God at work, manifest in the world not just metaphorically, but literally.
The doubt in Sawyer snapped like a twig. Tears weeping from his eyes he continued his own prayers as he fired shot after shot into those monstrous shadows that were trying to claw their way past Father Jacob's light. Till finally there were no more roars, no more screams, no more shadows.
There were only tears.
Sometime later, the innocents seen off to an appropriate shelter to be debriefed by authorities, Father Jacob's hands were on Sawyer's shoulders. He said no words, none were needed. Father Jacob could tell that Sawyer had hit rock bottom, and had been there a long while. But he could also tell that there was much more to Sawyer than skid row. He had seen it in Sawyer's prayers, in the resoluteness of his action, in the sheer religious ferocity with which he had disposed of those creatures from hell. No ordinary man could have taken down those creatures, as could be attested by the three now dead hunters who had tried.
Father Jacob brought Sawyer to his church, helped him clean up. Sawyer's faith had been reborn, his drinking a thing of the past. The rather large bounty awarded for taking down those hell beasts was given all to Father Jacob, as the other hunters had not survived, and Father Jacob in turn gave it all to Sawyer to help him get back on his feet.
Sawyer was now aware of the supernatural world, though he had much yet to learn about it. He also had a new purpose, to protect the innocent from such horrors. His faith is formless, he owes no allegiance to any dogma, but his faith is real. If such evil could exist in the real world, then so too could goodness, and he would see it so.
He lives in a backroom of Father Jacob's church and helps out when not involved in his nascent career of hunting. He doesn't subscribe to the church's doctrine, but he is a man of faith, so much so that the locals, those who know him on skid row have come to call him none the less, the Shotgun Preacher.
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Sawyer has a lot to atone for, and given his lifestyle probably not that much time to do it in.
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"...And he shall bring upon them their own iniquity, and shall cut them off in their own wickedness..."
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Sawyer is not just good with shotguns, he subconsciously channels something...else. Something born of faith, capable of harming Supernatural threats. In theory it would likely work with other weapons, but Saywer only uses shotguns by choice.
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Sawyer is good for two things, street level intel, and serious muscle if bad things need putting down. He lives in a church and has no real job; he spends his time helping out with church charities, soup kitchens and homeless shelters...and when the need arises he kills the occasional monster preying on the helpless people of the street.
Sawyer's actions are selfless to a nearly-suicidal fault, but his desire to do good is genuinely pure. He is dry for months running at a stretch, but his reformation would be precarious were it not for his faith, as he has not yet addressed the psychological trauma of his upbringing. His lack of self makes him brave to the point of foolishness.
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