All the News Fit to Print
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Cassie is a reporter. Okay, so it's for a relatively small town local newspaper, but that doesn't mean she's not a real journalist. What it does mean is that she often pays a great deal of attention to the news across the country. She's got ambitions greater than just this paper, even if she's not sure she really wants to leave her hometown behind to pursue them just yet.
Anyway, it's not like there aren't plenty of things she can work on for bigger and more recognizable news organizations without leaving town. She's working on a project about serial killers across the US, specifically ones from the past couple years, and she really doesn't believe her eyes the first time she sees the report. The number of victims isn't shocking, though the extensive torture might have otherwise caught her eye because it is one of the more gruesome cases compared to the ones she's already compiled notes on. However the thing that makes her stop and blink in disbelief and horror is the painfully familiar name of Dean Winchester jumping out at her. As the murderer. The dead murderer. From a case that happened months before the last time she saw Dean.
Cassie goes so far as to make a few calls and investigate, because she cannot find it in herself to believe Dean would do anything like what this article is implying. Even if she wasn't certain of his character, the fact Dean is clearly alive shows something is seriously wrong with this supposedly closed case. There just has to be more to the story, right? Things were never going to work out between the two of them, and she can't do anything else for him, but maybe she can do something about this. Investigative reporting is what she does, and she doesn't like that his name has been smeared like this. It offends both her sense of justice and her ideals about the integrity of those reporting on it, to not have noticed the police made such a strange mistake in the identity of the killer.
Except it turns out she can't do anything about it. Her credentials and her persistence (more the latter than the former, she's fairly sure), pay off just enough for her to see plenty of evidence that points to Dean really having done what they say he has. Granted almost all of it is tied to the last in a string of crimes, but for the Saint Louis cops, that's more than enough. The only concrete hole she can find is that Dean is definitely alive and not whoever they buried under that headstone with his name, but she doesn't think it would help him any to make an issue of that part alone. She's still angry about it, but she reluctantly lets the matter rest. It is at least something of a comfort he's not dead; there had been the briefest of moments after seeing the article but before comprehending the date where she'd felt grief just as much as shock. Except Cassie also realizes it's been long enough she can't be entirely sure it's still true now. The danger he was regularly in was one of the many reasons a relationship would have never been feasible between them, but that doesn't mean it's quite so easy to completely let go of the feelings that had already survived believing he'd blown her off by pretending to be crazy.
It's some time later once the outrage and worry have faded, between a few months and a year, when she feels the same shock catch her again at Dean's name making the news. This time it's a current report on a series of robberies culminating in a SWAT infiltration at a bank. Where her supposedly dead ex-boyfriend and his brother had taken a bunch of civilians hostage and stolen nothing, but left behind a couple of bodies before they disappeared into the night. Despite the building being entirely surrounded. The string of murders in Saint Louis had been appalling, but this one is just weird – especially the part where one of the witnesses says the Winchester brothers saved her from her murderous evil twin. As strange as it is, she saves the article and tracks down the news videos, looking back at it every now and then for a while after. It makes her oddly happy, because whatever the hell went on there, no matter how frustrating it is to her to be so in the dark about someone she cares, cared, about, at least this shows Dean is still alive somewhere and she knows that's a good thing.
After the bank, she finds herself actively searching for Dean's name. She still never expects to see him again, and she has absolutely no idea what could be going on with him that he's showing up in association with such serious crimes. Still, if he's shown up twice now, it seems fairly likely he'll do so again. She knew his life was majorly weird as soon as it became clear he'd been telling the truth back when they'd been together, but her curiosity is truly piqued now, against her own better judgment. She doesn't want to be involved in that world he's part of, one run in with an angry ghost was one too many to begin with so far as she's concerned, but she is curious by nature. That and her desire to reveal hidden truths had lead to her wanting to be a reporter in the first place. What harm can it do, after all, just to keep track of the weird ways Dean shows up in the news?
Cassie isn't wrong about him turning up again. The next incident is small, and if she hadn't already had Dean's name earmarked, there's no way she'd have caught it. It's an arrest report for a small-time museum break in, with the suspects Dean and Sam Winchester being sent to Green River County Detention Center until they can be extradited for the earlier crimes. She isn't really tempted to take off and visit the prison to see Dean and ask him what the hell is going on. She doesn't want to be sucked into the weirdness of his world, so there would be no point. Even if it crosses her mind – a few times, every day. At least until the next slightly lengthier article about the two of them escaping the prison shows up. She just shakes her head and smiles a little at that one, adding a printout of the two mentions to the one about the bank.
The next time Dean Winchester's name crosses her computer screen, it doesn't leave her nearly so amused. There's another report that he's dead, and this time it makes her breath catch and her heart pound just as bad as the first time she'd come across mention of him as a serial killer. She has no assurance this one isn't true, and that hurts. It crosses her mind to try calling him, but the one time she was feeling brave (or maybe foolish) enough to do that previously, the number she'd had for him was already out of service. It seems pretty strange a man who spent his life chasing monsters would die in a helicopter crash at a police station, but then none of the other newsworthy incidents have made sense to her, either. The idea of actually researching what kind of weird things from his world might exist and be behind it all crosses her mind more than once, but she backs down every time. A good reporter knows how to sort fact from fiction, but the supernatural is not an area where she has the expertise to do that, and she's afraid earning it would dig her deeper than she wants to go. It's a battle between curiosity and what she'd like to call good judgment, but suspects might also simply be fear.
Somewhere along the line, looking for Dean's name had become a habit, and if anything, this latest report of his demise only intensifies her search. Unfortunately, it's a fruitless one. She keeps trying and widens her range, finding more and more odd articles about mysterious murders, some of nearly entire towns, unusual destructive weather patterns, and that strange beam of light from some abandoned convent in Maryland so many had suspected was a terrorist attack. She can't actually find any mention of Dean, and yet her gut feeling tells her he's involved somehow. Finally, when all the strange, practically omen-like events cease with the same suddenness they started, she still hasn't found any mention of him. The only thing she thinks might be a lead is a series of hangup calls from an unknown number that come in while she's gone for a week to a conference out of town. By the time she's able to call the number back, it's also out of service. Unsure if she just imagined the whole thing and is chasing a dead man or if his continued existence and involvement is just something she'll never prove, she reluctantly lets go of what has become almost an obsession. It hurts a bit, but Cassie has always prided herself on her practicality, and the worrying with a complete lack of answers is starting to really bother her. She doesn't let go all at once, but gradually she stops looking for signs of Dean.
That's the end of it for quite a while, years, actually. She hasn't ever exactly forgotten about Dean, but she'd stopped actively looking for mentions of him and has found someone else better suited to share her life with. However, just because she's mostly moved on doesn't mean he won't come back to haunt her again. In what she sincerely hopes will be the last time she hears about him, it isn't just the mention of his name in some obscure article. There's no way to avoid the evening news showing video clips of Dean and his brother Sam brutally gunning down multiple rooms full of people across the country in a horrifying mass murder spree. She still wants to believe it isn't possible Dean could ever do something like this, but this time she doesn't have the reassurance of a suspiciously dead duplicate. All she really knows about his life is that it's unfathomably crazy. If there's so much more to the world than she knows, how can she be sure there isn't so much more to Dean? She'd like to believe nobody could really hide anything that ugly so well, but over the years she'd found it was sometimes amazing what people could manage to just not see. Even beyond the things that went bump in the night.
She'd been kidding herself by following reports of him in the news, thinking those incidents were some kind of weird phenomena like the ghost truck that had shown up and haunted her family. She'd been letting herself continue to feel connected to Dean through them, oddly safe that there was somebody out there dealing with the weird she hadn't been able to forget existed. When the spree finally comes to an end, whether or not he's really dead this time, whether or not he really killed all those people, she is sure of one thing. As much as she's a journalist and a curious person who likes to have answers, this is too far and too ugly and whatever the truth might be about any of it, she no longer really wants to know.
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A/N: Meant this to be a thematic piece about realizing that sometimes ignorance is bliss and how people's own fears could easily contribute to the muggle effect in canons like Supernatural. I still feel like there should possibly be one more step somewhere to tie it all together a little more tidily, but multiple edits have left me unable to capture it.