When you get things in perspective
Spread the news and help the word go 'round

One trip to the emergency room and one bandaged ankle later, Kat settled into the living room couch, propped her damaged foot on a pillow on the coffee table, and promptly began abusing her status as Sick and Injured.

"The doctor said I wasn't supposed to walk on it," she whined, as the conclusion to a plea that Josh fetch the remote for her. The remote was barely out of her arm's reach, and he was already sitting down.

But he grabbed it and threw it at her, saying, "You know, for someone who's supposed to be a tough, independent chick, you play damsel-in-distress a lot."

"No, I exploit my resources. That would be you and Berto. You and Berto are suckers. Suckers fall for the damsel-in-distress routine. Therefore, I play it." Remote in hand, she gave him an overly helpless look, complete with batted eyelashes. The whining was back. "I need something to drink."

He folded his arms across his chest and refused to move. "Like I'm going to help you now."

"Hate the game, McGrath, not the player." She turned on the TV. "Let's see if we made something other than SportsCenter tonight."

And indeed they had, as the eleven o'clock edition of the local news was leading off with a big, splashy graphic that looked as though it'd come straight from someone's collection of twenty-year-old clip art.

The lead talking head - a man in his forties who hadn't been handsome or talented enough to cut it as an actor - was being oddly upbeat for a bank robbery. "Well, there was some major excitement downtown tonight, wasn't there, Mary?"

His young, perfectly blonde co-anchor smiled a wide and polished smile. "That's right, Bill, and one of our camera crews was there to capture it all."

Footage rolled to the tune of her voiceover. "Earlier tonight, the Del Oro Memorial Bank was the target of an attempted robbery. Amazingly, this shocking theft wasn't stopped by the police, but by two of our city's brave residents who just happened to be on the scene."

Josh watched himself knock a robber unconscious and grinned. The image quality was pretty good, although the camera was jittery. "Berto's gonna be sorry he missed this."

"That is amazing," Bill put in, more condescending than impressed.

Mary nodded enthusiastically. "We've just received conformation from our source inside the police department that the two good samaritans are extreme sports athletes Josh McGrath and Katherine Ryan-"

Kat made a disgusted noise. "That's not my name, you bleached-out moron!"

"It's not?" Josh asked, blinking at her. He'd always assumed Kat was short for something. Kathleen, maybe? She didn't look like a Kathleen - or a Katherine, for that matter.

She shot him a killer glare and said, "Okay, you're losing points now, so stop while you're ahead."

Mary was still chattering. "- is sponsored by local sporting goods manufacturer N-Tek. Not coincidentally, N-Tek's CEO and president, Jefferson Smith - seen here in this file photo - is McGrath's legal guardian."

Josh flung up his hands. "Oh, great, now they're making it sound like nepotism."

Bill's smug expression said that was exactly the intent. "Well, it's a proud day for the whole N-Tek family, I'm sure."

"And what makes this amazing feat of heroism even more memorable, Bill," Mary said, laying a confiding hand on her co-anchor's arm, "is that McGrath and Ryan were on a date at the time."

Bill's response was completely drowned out by twin cries of, "WHAT?!"

"Since WHEN?" Josh added, jumping up to confront the television more directly.

"That was not a date," Kat said. She tried to push herself off the couch, banged her ankle on the corner of the table, and sat back down. "Were you on a date? 'Cause I sure wasn't."

But he wasn't even listening to her. "That's slander," he said, pointing at the TV, which was now showing him standing around and joking with Kat while they waited for the cops. "Or maybe libel. Whatever. We can sue. Dad knows more lawyers-"

Josh froze in mid-thought and mid-sentence.

"What?" Kat asked.

She wasn't apprehensive - just annoyed. Well, that would change fast, he thought. "Dad always watches the eleven o'clock news."

Her eyes widened. "How long will it take?"

He sighed and put a hand over his eyes. "Five, four, three, two..."

The phone rang.

They exchanged a hopeless glance, and then Josh grabbed the phone from its resting place on the desk. "Hello?"

"Is there something you want to tell me, son?"

In all the world, there was nothing so frightening to Josh McGrath as the voice of his father when Jefferson Smith was trying not to be angry. It was a voice that had echoed through his childhood of stupid acts and dangerous stunts. He vividly recalled hearing that voice ask exactly the same question after he rode his bike no-hands on the roof of their house.

Defensively, he said, "Yeah - don't believe everything you see on television."

"So you saw that."

"Oh, we saw that."

"On the local news?"

"Yeah," Josh said warily, wondering where he was going with it.

"It doesn't stop there. Check ZNN."

He took the remote from Kat and flipped channels until he got to the twenty-four-hour headline news channel. The reporter of the moment was talking next to a still image of the robbery footage - but not the actual fight. No, this was a shot of the two of them walking away.

With no small amount of horror, he realized that they were telling the same story as Bill and Mary, only with more speculation and even less basis in reality.

"Someone is going to die for this," Kat said, very clearly.

Josh suddenly became aware of his father yelling over the phone and put the thing to his ear again. "I'm here, Dad. Sorry."

"You weren't on a date. I'll accept the statement you made to the contrary as a joke. So why were you there?"

He couldn't take watching the national news media spreading lies about his personal life, so he wandered into the kitchen. "At the DOX, I bet her dinner that she couldn't get a perfect score on the vert ramp. She did."

Still in the living room, Kat prompted, "And -?"

Josh scowled. "And that's only happened once before."

"To -?"

"To Tony Hawk," he said, louder than necessary, which was met with an evil, amused snicker from the living room. "So she said I had to take her to a really good restaurant."

There was a moment of silence on the other end of the line, and then his father said, "That was a month ago, Josh."

"And we've been running around trying to save the world ever since." There was always something. The Del Oro Extreme was once a year, but the villains worked every day.

"Point," his father acknowledged. "What about when you were leaving? You were leaning on each other."

"Because she sprained her ankle! We went straight to the emergency room. You can check the medical records." Josh ran a hand through his hair. "So we can force them to retract this, right? Issue a correction or an apology or something?"

"I'm calling our legal team together right now, and I've already got some of our PR people on hold. A lot of what happens will depend on what they say. This may not have a tidy ending, son. But I have your best interests in mind - yours and Kat's."

"Thanks, Dad."

"Get some sleep," his father said, and added less sympathetically, "And remember that you leave the hero stuff to Max for a reason."

Josh hung up and stalked back into the living room. Somehow, without quite realizing it, he'd gotten the drink Kat had been whining for earlier. He handed it to her ungraciously and dropped down on the couch beside her.

The phone rang.

Josh picked it up and heard, "Hi, I'm a reporter with-"

He hung up. It rang again almost immediately, but this time no one answered it.

"We," he said to Kat, staring bleakly at the TV, "are in a lot of trouble."