Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

“It’s actually a net good for society if you climb the trees, Perry the Platypus,” Heinz is telling Perry as they stroll the orchard path. He’s sagging a little under the weight of a basket they’ve mostly filled.

“See I know there’s that rule, ‘no climbing’. But that’s for the 8 year olds who fall and crack their heads open -- the emotionally unbalanced teens out to break an arm. Not for you, Perry the Platypus. Treehopping is a cakewalk for you. You’re like a ninja up there.”

Perry flips his wool scarf and surveys the lowhanging branches, pointedly ignoring Heinz. He vaults up to snag a Golden Delicious, dunks it square into the basket from over his shoulder, not looking. Heinz whistles, even as the impact buckles his knees. “That’s what I mean.”

He catches up to Perry -- “What about the apples at the top of the trees, Perry the Platypus, do you think of them? Nobody can pick them, so they rot on the tree or rot on the ground. No one comes to an orchard to pick apples off the ground.”

Perry signs: Two-year olds.

“Besides them,” Heinz insists. “That’s like a third of all the apples just going to waste, so nobody can enjoy them.”

Birds and bugs, signs Perry. Can enjoy them.

Heinz ponders this. “Maybe. But I can tell you they’d enjoy my fresh-baked strudel a lot more.”

Perry makes a “yeah, yeah” wave to brush off Heinz’s winning point. Heinz can see the smile curving up his bill from behind, as he walks ahead. “Hold up, Perry the Platypus,” he says. “I think we have enough.”

Heinz sets the basket down, intensely grateful to rest his arms, and Perry skips back over to survey their haul. An even mix of Jonathan, Smeralda, and Goldens. “The best for baking out of the October set, in my experience,” Heinz explains to Perry. “These Goldens look a little young, but I think they’ll cook up okay. Could also use them for a syrup, I’ve been meaning to try that.”

The walk back to the exit is when it hits. Perry reaches out a paw and pushes it against Heinz’s leg, tentative. Then he wrenches the fabric into both fists, hard, and chirps. This makes Heinz stop.

“Perry the Platypus? What’s up?”

It’s like a hypnic jerk, the sensation -- a dizziness cresting over him like an ocean wave, a loudening roar of foam. Perry looks up at Heinz, finds his blue-ringed eyes wide with alarm, like his own. And he holds Heinz’s leg like it’s the last stable thing, as the wave swallows him up in a gulp, then silence.

Perry thinks I’m having a stroke, before he can’t think it.

“...Perry? You okay?” Heinz has dropped the basket and is crouching down to Perry’s level. “What’s wrong, did I forget something? We have enough apples,” he says, knowing that’s not the problem. “If you want more, you’re carrying and paying.”

Perry’s still linking his gaze with Heinz’s, clutching his knee like he needs it for balance. He chitters out an anxious exhalation. Heinz taps him on the bill. “Hey. You gonna clue me in here?”

Perry shakes off the touch and backs away from Heinz, pinwheeling his arms and toppling onto the ground. The scarf gets trapped under his forepaw, pulls taut around his neck -- then he’s racing forward in a panic through the red leaf litter, growling at a high pitch, as the scarf trails after and under him.

“Perry!” Heinz exclaims, craning around to follow Perry’s tracks -- he bumbles into the basket, shooting apples out like poolballs. “Settle down -- tell me what’s wrong, okay? You’re scaring me.” He pushes himself up. “And that’s not how you treat that scarf. That’s Merino, Perry, it took me weeks to knit. You’re grinding dirt into it.”

Perry halts, at the tail of Heinz’s upbraiding, and looks at him with wide eyes. Heinz approaches him slowly, like he’s an animal he might startle away. But Perry doesn’t run, when Heinz leans over him -- actually seems to settle, as Heinz clasps his hands around his shoulders.

“Perry the Platypus.” His brown eyes blink. “What is going on with you?”

Heinz picks him up. “You’re going to have to say something,” he says. “Or I’m going to assume this is an emergency. Are your arms malfunctioning? One blink yes, two blinks no.”

This gets no blinks.

Heinz drops Perry into the basket and runs out to the parking lot -- dropping a 20 on the checkout stall as he does, to cover the apples still in the bottom of the basket. They need to get home.

The OWCA watch beeps while Heinz is driving, Perry basket-bound in the passenger seat. Perry jolts and lifts his paw, looks at the glowing screen -- in the side of his vision Heinz sees Perry press his beak into the watchface. “God, not now, Francis...” he mutters.

Heinz parks right next to the elevators in the apartment garage. His phone buzzes right as he shuts the car door. “Perry the Platypus, we’re going upstairs, okay?” he says. “You want to stay in the basket?”

Perry’s just staring into him as he’s addressed, no reaction to the question. So Heinz exhales and walks to the elevator, basket steady in his arm, and checks his phone. It’s from Carl: Dr. D, this is urgent: is Perry okay?

He freezes in the elevator lobby, and dials.

“Carl, are you there?”

“Yes, Doofenshmirtz, hi. Listen, I need to --”

“Do you KNOW about this? What’s going on with him?”

“I -- oh dear,” says Carl, sounding sad. “I guess it worked. How is he? Can you describe his behavior?”

Heinz balks at that, staring at his phone -- Carl just confessed to screwing Perry up somehow and now he’s asking after him like a caring orderly, shameless.

“Are you kidding me? His behavior? He’s not himself, Carl,” Heinz shoots back. The metallic echo of the boxy room amplifies his voice, so he tries not to yell too loud -- Perry is out of the basket on the floor of the room, staring nervously up at him from a few paces away. “He doesn’t seem to get what I’m saying, he had a major panic attack out of the blue -- and he won’t talk to me. Like, no signs, no nods. He’s walking on all fours, Carl. What did you do?!”

“It wasn’t me,” Carl squeaks defensively. “I mean -- it’s this audit, Heinz, the agent program investigation. They didn’t even notify us they were sending people over today. It’s FBI people, they” -- his voice tightens to a whisper -- “they busted into every office, they found some of our server rooms and -- look, I can’t get into this right now, but I’ll call you back as soon as I can. Just ... just keep Perry safe, take him home. And for the love of god don’t let him escape.”

Carl hangs up in a hurry, before Heinz can yell a reply. He scowls at the red call-end sign.

“What the hell is wrong with that kid,” Heinz asks the room. “Maybe Francis knows. I have to give him a call. I hate when it comes to that, Perry the Platypus.”

Perry is doubling back to the apple basket, slinking close to the floor with visible nerves. He clambers back inside. Heinz pushes the elevator button.

Upstairs, Heinz drops the basket on the kitchen island and budges Perry’s hat aside to place a hand on his head. “First things first, Perry the Platypus. We’re going to give you a checkup. Okay?”

Perry still doesn’t react, but Heinz will keep treating this like a two-way conversation. It’s an old habit that he hasn’t slipped into in a long time. He didn’t miss it.

Heinz leads him to the bathroom -- Perry mostly sticks by his feet, but stops in place once or twice, swiveling his gaze around the spacious penthouse canopy, either like it’s new to him, or like he’s remembering it. He snaps back whenever Heinz calls his name -- there’s that, at least. It’s not much, but it’s something.

Phineas’s housewarming gift, one of them, had been a platypus first-aid kit. He’d presented it to Heinz back when Perry had just told his family about them and Heinz was hosting a “win Perry the Platypus’s family over” lunch (unofficial title that Perry had deleted off the invitation cards). Heinz had read a kind of parental judgment into the gift choice, at the time, like the kid wasn’t trusting him to take adequate care of Perry on his own, without being handheld. Maybe Heinz’s reading was unfair -- he has a chip on his shoulder, when it comes to mom behavior.

He unsnaps it. The case is overstuffed -- it pops open with decollapsing trays of portable disinfectant and numbing wipes, surgical sewing kits, cut-closing gel and fur-safe teal bandages to cover it in all sizes, claw trimmers and medicated toothpastes and endoscopes. An impressive degree of overkill -- he really likes that kid, past misgivings aside.

“I’m just checking a few basic things,” Heinz tells Perry as he rummages through and pulls out a stethoscope. “Fever, stress, blood oxygen. You never know what can affect the brain -- a lot of things, really. Including Carl. Well we already know it’s Carl,” he grumbles. Perry’s irises contract at the flashlight shine, and he blinks and squirms in Heinz’s hold. “I’ll just have to squeeze him for answers later. Knowing the brain geniuses at OWCA they activated some stolen villain tech without back-engineering it first -- a mind-control beam, some harebrained monotreme-dumbdowninizer. Are they still using my memory eraser?” He huffs -- pulse and blood pressure readings are normal. “Why’d I ever make that thing. I can never recall.

“Everything looks fine so far, Perry the Platypus. That’s... that’s good,” he says, not feeling it. Perry is poking his bill inquisitively into the trays of the first-aid kit. Heinz will need to break out the MRInator. Been a while, so he’ll need to tune it first, which could take hours. Better get started on it right away. He needs to be working right now, because if he stops he thinks he will gelatinize into a ball of terror. That wouldn’t help Perry.

He’s 15 minutes into his work, checking that the gradient coils are aligned, when the phone rings. His screwdriver hits the ground as he lunges for it, ready to yell the full story out of Carl. But it’s Peter calling. He stares at the profile photo, which is many years out of date.

“...Hello? Peter the Panda, since when do you call? What’s up?”

“Hi, hi -- Doofenshmirtz?” comes a voice on the other end. It’s pitchy, so he has trouble placing it at first.

“Mystery? Is that you?”

This is weird. Heinz never talks to this guy. He isn’t even up on whether Professor Mystery’s still practicing evil -- just gets the impression from Peter that they’re doing alright together, whenever the two of them cross paths.

“I’m calling because something’s wrong with Peter,” he says, a quaver in his voice that Heinz can hear he is trying to suppress. “And I wanted to ask if you know anything. Did you do something to him, Doofenshmirtz? Or, if you didn’t. Can... can you come over here? Can you help me talk to him? I thought maybe he’d respond if he saw a familiar face, or maybe you’d have one of your... weird machines that could help him.”

“Verdammt noch mal,” Heinz hisses through the hand raking down his face.“That agency. It’s all of them?”

“...What?”

“It’s OWCA, Mystery, they did something to all of the agents. Apparently, if it hit Peter. Perry’s the same way.”

“...Oh,” responds Mystery. He sounds lost. “So can you come up here? I’ll -- I’ll cover your tickets. Both of them.”

Like he’d fly there commercial. “Mystery, I’m getting details out of the OWCA guys right now. I need more information before I can make any plans. Sorry.”

And Mystery couldn’t pay him enough to take Perry out of the city right now. Perry’s been hopping between the sofa and the carpet, then walking over to Heinz and bumping into his side as he works, before cycling back to the sofa, a knot of agitation. Right now he’s digging his forepaws into a couch cushion, like he’s trying to find something that isn’t there.

On the end of the line Mystery sniffles -- oh, no. “What happened to him, Doofenshmirtz?” he says, voice cracking. “My parents were trying to figure it out, they were asking me how old he is -- but it was so sudden, like something hit all at once. My dad asked if I let him go near any black holes recently.”

“Did you?” Heinz asks, genuine. Mystery got up to some hardcore science in the old days.

There’s an ursine growl on the other end, angrier than Peter sounds. “No. That’s their baggage. But I was worried,” Mystery says, “about the age thing. Because. Well.”

Heinz knows Peter’s well into his 20s, by now.

“There’s only so many more years, for him,” Mystery says, faltering. “And so -- what if this is -- if this is how he is now,” he wavers, “then that means I didn’t even... have the time, have the time I thought.”

This precedes a total breakdown of his speech into wracking sobs, that don’t transmit prettily over the phone audio. Heinz pulls the phone away from his ear, frowning at it with no little sympathy. Mystery’s age, like so much about him, has never been clear to Heinz -- but he can tell the guy’s young, comparatively. Whatever their relationship passes for there’s a strained mentorship quality to it -- Mystery has turned to Heinz for answers, in the past, and has repaid him with petulant resentment every time. It’s very bratty. Like when Vanessa would ask him for help with science projects. Heinz can’t resist another opportunity to help each time he’s asked, even knowing the outcome.

But consoling this man wasn’t on Heinz’s docket for today. “Mystery,” he says, “You’ll get that time. You cannot have so little faith in Peter the Panda, so soon after something happens to him. You’re a scientist -- you’re a master of mystery. Give it a few days, before you have a breakdown, alright? That’s what Peter would want.”

Heinz thought that was pretty good, but Mystery just cries harder on the line. He feels shaken -- he doesn’t want to be hearing this right now. That’s selfish, he knows -- but Mystery has family. Mystery can handle himself, and he can handle Peter. Heinz cares deeply for Peter’s wellbeing, still, but part of caring has meant learning to trust his choice of partner, just like Peter trusts his.

“Look, Mystery, I have to go,” he says -- he looks up, and doesn’t see Perry. Suddenly he meant what he said, with an urgency. “Get your parents to help, and tell them all morbid speculation is banned. Give them a furbrush, tell them go to town on him. They’ll love it, he’ll love it. Bye.”

He snaps off the call and rushes through the house, looking for Perry. The kitchen, the balcony ledge, the pool. This place is too big, when he doesn’t want it to be.

He finds a puddle in the bathroom. Perry knew enough to go in there, apparently, but not how to use the toilet.

Perry is back in the sitting room hiding under the glass coffee table, tail curled under like he’s ashamed. “Oh, Perry the Platypus,” Heinz sighs, kneeling at the table and reaching under to stroke Perry’s head. “What are we going to do with you.”

Mr. Fluffypants’ old litterbox is in the storage room that used to belong to Norm. He sets it up next to the toilet. Their bathroom has ample room. He exits, knowing he has to keep the inertia rolling, has to work, can’t process that he just set out a litterbox for Perry. How is he supposed to process that.

Right across from the door, in the hallway, there’s an elongated picture frame with photos from a family beach trip, when Heinz had more color in his hair. The left side highlights Vanessa, who’d brought along a friend -- she’s laughing in some of them, more unrestrained happiness than she showed in her gradeschool years. There’s the massive sandcastle they’d constructed, Norm using his vacant head to scoop, Vanessa lifting Perry up to decorate the upper echelons with fine detail, the two of them focused on this process for a long time while they’d chatted. And then photos of Perry, the surf breaking over his feet as he poses with a notch-tailed surfboard, cool confidence in the line of his smile. Heinz loves that picture: he looks so handsome, his white beach shirt open and playing in the wind.

He finds himself staring at it. This was Perry an hour ago.

He calls out: “Do you know Vanessa, Perry the Platypus? Va-ne-ssa?”

No response, obviously -- Heinz is convinced he could jostle some kind of reaction out of Perry if Vanessa stopped by in person, like Mystery had been aiming at with him. But he has no intention of letting her see him in this state. Perry would hate that.

Heinz collapses into his folded arms on the kitchen island, amid the newly-purchased bags of flour and sugar, for the apple pie they will not be making tonight. He doesn’t want to eat.

But Perry should, he realizes after a minute, lifting his head. Perry seems less agitated now, has been wandering the floor. Right now he’s peering out at the balcony sky, seated. Heinz walks over to him. “You’re not going to try and run off of that, right?” Perry looks up. “Carl made it sound like you were gonna bolt if I so much as left a door open.” But Perry’s been keeping near to him, following him from room to room. The real Perry isn’t this clingy. “I don’t trust you to operate a parachute right now, Perry the Platypus. And don’t let me see you going in the jetpack closet.”

More empty eye contact. “Let’s get you dinner.”

It’s reheated lasagna they’d made a few nights ago, beef and zucchini. Heinz stares hopefully at Perry as he eats it off the plate, thinking the taste might stir a memory. He noses the fork off the table, jumps a little at its clatter, then starts nibbling bites off the edge of the lasagna block. Heinz is over there cutting it up with a butter knife when Carl’s return call finally buzzes in his pocket -- he puts it on the tabletop set to speaker mode. “Carl. I hope you’re ready to talk.”

“Yes Doofenshmirtz, hi,” returns the tinny nasal voice. “I had to get home -- Monogram’s getting grilled over there, and he wouldn’t stop yelling back at them, at the FBI agents, who were jumping at the bit to arrest him. I managed to broker a peace,” Carl ends, proudly.

“That’s fantastic, Carl,” says Heinz. “How about explaining what you did to Perry the Platypus’s brain? It hit Peter too, by the way, I know this is a bigger problem than you want me to think.”

“I don’t want you to think anything!” says Carl. “This wasn’t my choice, Heinz, or Monogram’s for that matter. They turned off the agent control switch. I kept telling them they didn’t need to do that, they should just leave the agents alone -- it’s more safe that way, honestly, we didn’t even know what would happen if they used it. But they just said if it’s part of the animal program, it needs to go.”

Heinz’s stomach sinks lower than he thought it could. “Agent control switch? You’re controlling them?”

“No!” says Carl. “It’s not a -- clear term. Nobody’s controlling the animals, Heinz. It’s like a remote control hub, with a binary state, on and off. They shut it off.”

“So that’s good,” Heinz falters, trying not to let the ominous weight of whatever this implies overwhelm his thought. “You can just switch it back on. It sounds like you can literally fix this with a button press, Carl, so do it.”

“Well, yes and no,” Carl dithers. “They shut it off. Then they confiscated all our equipment. They said ‘classified’, when I asked where it was going. So my guess is it’ll end up in some storage basement or the FBI dumpster, based on how badly they mishandled it. They split open the casing just getting it out of the room, it was hard to watch.”

That sounds about right for OWCA, 70s-era supercomputers filling up rooms they were never intended to leave. “So the switch controls something in Perry’s head?” Heinz asks, steadily. He’s thinking of the giant magnet he was about to put Perry inside. “Like a metal chip?”

“It’s a bioelectric material, I’m pretty sure,” Carl says. “Part of what makes it so hard to access, once it’s inside. The investigators were going to make us lobotomize all the agents, if I hadn’t told them about the switch, it was the only choice. They’re serious about stamping out this program, Heinz, like they’re trying to erase it from the public consciousness. Because if people see a dog in a hat they’ll mob up and burn the government down, apparently.”

Heinz feels on board with that plan at the moment. “Carl. Professor Mystery’s having a breakdown, I had to talk him off the cliff this afternoon. Neither of us knew about this. You didn’t tell any of us,” the heat is rising in his voice, “that Peter and Perry had something in them that you controlled, that this could happen at any minute. Did they know about this?”

Carl is quiet a second. “... I’m not sure,” he says. “I thought Perry knew. It’s not a major secret, it’s just what we do, to promising recruits. It’s had a less pronounced effect in the newer ones, since we stopped putting them in babies. But Perry’s always had it. That’s why he’s so intelligent. But he might not have known about the control switch -- it’s really a relic, we haven’t run power through it in decades, since we’ve had no reason to deactivate the agents.”

Perry’s nosing around the table, his lasagna half-eaten -- he makes a small noise of complaint. “Oh -- I didn’t give you water,” Heinz realizes. A cup seems too optimistic, so he fills up a bowl.

“Is that Perry?” asks Carl from the phone speaker -- Heinz rolls his eyes. “How is he? I’m really sorry, by the way, Heinz -- there’s a lot on our plates over here, I’m just trying to keep us afloat and Monogram on a leash. You know I care about him, too.”

“Then fix him,” says Heinz. Carl goes quiet, while Perry drinks from his bowl.

“...We’ll figure it out. Good night, Doofenshmirtz.”

Heinz looks out at the silent space of his apartment -- the living room lamp is taking on the brunt of lighting it, now the early autumn dark has fallen. With the phonecall battles over and done for the night, it seems quieter than usual.

This space is normally filled by just him and Perry, now that Norm and Vanessa are out on their own. Perry doesn’t talk, and employs his platypus noises judiciously, only making sound when he really wants Heinz’s attention, or is in a temper. But his presence fills the space, in a way that’s hard to explain, easy to feel.

Normal nights, Heinz gabs his way into the late hours with Perry as his receptive listener, and responder, accompanying Heinz on their end-of-day tidying chores, toweling dishes off for him to stack on high shelves, shooting him dry looks and signing quick sentences that make Heinz scoff. Perry believes Heinz is worth listening to, which makes Heinz want to keep chatting with him, more and more, a self-feeding loop that would overload the casual conversational partner. But Perry is no casual.

Normal afternoons, they work on parallel projects to the sound of old radio serials, to audiobooks of bestselling mystery novels, to the Landmarks in Evil podcast. Perry will grab Heinz’s attention to sign some withering remark on the spotlighted villain of the week, and Heinz will snort into his construction tools. Perry’s presence grants him undesired OWCA updates around the house, that they both groan at simultaneously. Perry grants him gift-laden drop-ins from Ferb and Phineas -- literal balcony visits, often, since those kids and their friends fly around the city in more novel contraptions than Perry once did. Perry gives him looks that say everything.

Now, Perry has hopped off the kitchen chair and is padding around Heinz into the living room space. He turns to look at Heinz, like he keeps on doing, but his face expresses only a primal distress. He cries a high, querulous note, foreign on Perry’s tongue. Heinz could step on Perry’s tail ten times -- he has -- and not hear a noise that heartrending.

“I know, Perry the Platypus.” Such a thing you say to pets. But he shares Perry’s sentiment.

A flash of guilt twinges his stomach, and he pulls out his phone to text Peter’s number: Got the intel - I’m fixing it. Take care of Peter the Panda tonight.

A quick reply: I AM. Heinz’s lip quirks.

Heinz raps on the shell of the MRInator -- its completion feels less urgent, now that he has a better concept of the problem. He’ll finish it after a night of sleep, so he doesn’t risk frying Perry’s neurons. He doesn’t want to sleep, knows it won’t be easy, with this mountainous weight hanging over him. But dire times call for proper rest, he’s learned to accept, after 50-some odd years. He downs a plastic cup of Nyquil.

“I’ll have to fix you tomorrow, Perry the Platypus,” he tells him. “Or else I’ll start owing everyone an explanation. Really don’t wanna give the ‘Carl Scrambled Perry’s Brain’ apology tour to your family. I don’t think they’d talk to me again, even though everything is Carl’s fault. As established by the name of the tour.”

Perry wails again, a haunting trill sent into the darkness of the penthouse.

“But don’t worry,” Heinz adds, hurrying over to Perry -- he bends to pet his head. “I will fix this for you. And for Peter the Panda too, and all the other agents. I promise.”

Perry whines again, more quietly, in Heinz’s hold, looking up at him with sad brown eyes. Heinz rubs his old hands through the fur of his head -- Perry looks so different right now, hunched in a dog’s sitting posture. Whatever they did to him, whatever pathways are now shut off in his mind, must have enabled or encouraged more human postures, better standing balance -- who knows.

Heinz isn’t sure what to make of Perry now, this animal shell of him. He wonders if Perry feels the same about him -- what is he to Perry now? His partner, his mere protector? Is he less than he used to be?

Heinz takes his left paw, gently, lifting it in his hand. He thumbs the metal ring on his finger.

“For the MRI tomorrow,” he tells Perry. “In case I forget.” He removes it.

Perry pads after Heinz as he gets a glass of water from the sink, as he walks to the bedroom. He feels odd dressing down to his boxers, in front of him now. Perry doesn’t pay him any mind, though -- as soon as he walks in he jumps his way up to the bedspread, scrabbling at the blankets on the edge to barely avoid falling.

“Not letting you in any apple trees,” Heinz muses emptily.

He slumps back into the pillows, feeling the doxylamine fog roll in. “But I’ll need you back soon,” he says, “so we can do the Haunted Haymaze with the kids.”

Perry trods up to him on the blanket. He makes a quiet noise -- not scared or confused, but a regular krrr, like he used to make. A gentle declaration of presence, a little care-package growl. Heinz lifts his arm, and Perry crawls under it, pushing his head into his neck. This movement isn’t forgotten, to him.

Heinz hugs his other arm around Perry’s body, and he falls asleep.

Chapter Text

The MRI shows nothing. That’s an unpromising start to his and Perry’s day.

Heinz was expecting to see a darkening bruise, or an embedded neural device that stood out, a rectangular foreign body that he just hadn’t noticed before. He has several brain scans of Perry from years ago, taken in less desperate times. The guy got concussed a lot, from a young age, and Heinz was not entirely blameless in this -- they had both wanted at the time to confirm there was no growing encephalopathy. Now, looking at the old and new images side by side, he cannot discern a difference. But then, Heinz isn’t a brain surgeon.

“Really more of a rocket scientist,” he mutters.

For breakfast he’s forced himself to swallow down handfuls of wheat cereal, in a morose fugue. It’s all he deserves. Perry had a thick cut of Canadian bacon and a cooked egg after his scan, which has left him lightly snoozing next to Heinz’s workspace. His sleep sounds are the same, a cute wheezy snore through his nose.

This was a waste of time -- something Heinz knew in the back of his mind going in. If he found a neural implant there was no reason to assume he could safely access it, or modify it -- well, he’d enlist help at that point. But this was all stepping around the obvious solution: identifying that damn machine Carl had used, and using it to switch all the agents back on. A beautifully simple fix. He just needs to find it.

Heinz looks over at Perry’s slumbering form. He’s lounging belly-up on the carpet, forepaws quirked in the air, as he digests his meal.

What would Perry the Platypus do in this situation?

He’d spiderwalk and backflip through that FBI facility, effortlessly undetected, and hone in on the machine like a needle in a federal haystack. So never mind about Perry.

What would Heinz Doofenshmirtz do in this situation?

Heinz has amassed a back catalog of outlandishly pointless devices to rival SkyMall. Fortunately there is a short list among them that serve practical, multipurpose use. He considers the hologram disguise device: he could look up an FBI employee and copy his look to get inside. It might even work on a face scanner.

But the invisibility helmet seems better, simpler. The busy work day has just begun, so plenty of workers will be threading through the facility -- he can tailgate one of them and he’ll be inside, no sweat. FBI floorplans aren’t findable online, even on the evilnet, so he’ll just have to go room by room until he finds the confiscated OWCA equipment.

He pulls on yesterday’s jeans and a light sweater. The rain could be an issue, if he tracks water, so he pockets a handkerchief to wipe himself down.

And when he finds the machine -- he chews on this conundrum. The old Heinz would’ve summoned Norm at that point, to crash through a wall and haul it right out of the building, fly it back to DEI. That’s not happening, not without hours of preplanning and a very awkward phonecall to his robot son.

So he straps on a toolbelt, instead, and a crossbody bag packed with mini-screws and spare wire and soldering paste. He’ll fix it where it stands.

He considers letting Perry lie, but doesn’t want him to wake up in an empty house. Heinz jostles his shoulder. “Hey. I’ll be back in a few hours, Perry the Platypus.”

Perry gives Heinz a sleepy look. Heinz’s natural impulse is to kiss him goodbye. Kisses mean something different now, facing this helpless animal who seems more pet than partner. It stirs up dread in Heinz’s stomach, if he contemplates it.

Perry likes kisses though. He plants one on his head. This isn’t a dramatic goodbye. Why should it be dramatic? He has this, it’s fine.

Heinz has his hand on the door handle when his phone buzzes. He opens the text, which is a photo.

It’s mechanical gore: metal machine casing split open, retro capsule-shaped capacitors burst open like confetti poppers, cut and skinned wires sticking up like wild grass.

The accompanying message from Carl: What’d I tell you :(

A followup: They dumped all our smashed-up tech out back, Monty found it, he didn’t even have to go inside. Nothing salvageable.

So it’s just lying there in the open. Heinz had awoken at 6 AM this morning to a heavy thunderstorm, and the weather outside is still a grey drizzle. Any circuitry in there will be rusting soup. Carl is probably right.

Heinz slumps into a sitting position, his tool belt and bag ching-ing on the floor. Then, for good measure, he tilts back into a total recline, thunking his head on the welcome mat.

Perry walks up to him and pushes his bill into his shoulder. Heinz drops a reassuring hand onto his head, with the arm not covering his face. He should be relieved, really, that Monty and Carl just saved him from an inevitable and thoroughly unproductive police arrest.

But relief is hard to feel, staring out into the yawning chasm of ideas laid before him. No course of action is coming to mind. Nothing seems possible, now.

It might be time to get started on that apology tour.

---

Heinz pulls up next to Linda’s car in the Flynn-Fletcher driveway, where Ferb and Phineas are waiting in the misty air.

“Don’t you kids have school today?” he asks as he shuts the car door. It’s 11 AM on a Tuesday.

Phineas scratches his nose. “Yeah. But it’s...”

“We took an early lunch,” says Ferb.

Heinz frowns - he hadn’t meant for the kids to ditch school, when he sent them the email. What kid checks their email during school? What high schooler checks their email period? Vanessa is his one point of reference -- it’s possible these kids are not quite like her.

Phineas is peering into the car window. “Can I?” he asks, not really asking. He opens the passenger door and reaches in for Perry, who is nested in one of his preferred quilts. “Hey little guy,” he says to him -- Heinz walks over hastily to survey. “I hear you’re not feeling so good today.”

“He’s physically fine,” says Heinz, wanting to be helpful. Phineas is petting Perry around his head, down his back, rubbing under the chin of his bill. Perry’s eyes squint closed at the touch. “Unless you count the brain as physical. Which I guess it is.”

“Yeah. You said you ran a scan of him, Doctor D?”

“Oh -- yeah, I did, I brought you guys a copy.” He skips around the hood of the car and fishes it out of the driver side window. The first best thing he’d found, on his rapid departure from the house, was this Twilight school folder that Vanessa had spurned long ago. He flips open Robert Pattinson’s head to grab the printouts.

“Let’s take a look at that inside, it’s wet out,” says Ferb. He beckons Heinz into the open garage.

Phineas follows them in, Perry rolled up in his arms like a curling fern. His head is tilted into Phineas’s neck, the lighter fluff under his bill bared in the dim light. Heinz makes himself stop staring.

There’s a robust workbench upon which he spreads out his pages. Ferb clicks on a lamp that floods the tabletop with clean white light. He comes up well past Heinz’s shoulder, now, which is alarming -- definitely part bamboo, this kid.

“So I studied these all morning, but I couldn’t see anything weird. I even looked up ordinary platypus brain scans online -- you know, since if OWCA put something in his head, it stands to reason something in there would look different. But... I don’t know,” Heinz finishes, giving up. “You tell me. I know you kids will find whatever it is I missed.”

Phineas hands Perry off to Ferb, as he leans in to take a look. “Hm. I don’t see any dead zones. What was it you were looking for?”

“Um... inactivity? Maybe a section with lower signal strength, compared to the rest.” Heinz isn’t sure what else to say. If quizzed he doubts out he could identify the main parts of the human brain, much less Perry’s. “Can you read these okay?”

“Yeah -- no, these are good images,” Phineas reassures him, like a teacher. “I can tell he kept still. Did you tie him up, anesthetize him?”

A chill rolls across Heinz’s shoulders at the buried accusation. “No. He was good, he just... sat there,” he says. “It wasn’t the first time we ran him through it, so he might have been remembering what to do.”

“...Huh,” responds Phineas. Heinz winces -- why did he say that, it didn’t paint a rosy picture of their home life.

Ferb is standing in the middle of the garage, where he has seated Perry in a new-looking pet bed. “Platypuses are famously good at not doing anything,” he contributes. He’s strapping a helmet onto Perry which looks like one of those LED studded disco ball lamps.

“Perry’s been kind of bucking that trend, though,” says Phineas, walking over with his hands in his jacket pockets.

“Long may he continue to buck.” Ferb awakens a laptop with a key press and starts typing. The helmet clicks on with a mechanical buzz.

The air above Perry blossoms into eyesearing radiance -- suddenly there’s a huge 3d construction of his brain, neural circuits and arteries branching through it, glowing in the air.

Ferb taps through a few modes: the visualization strobes from a straightforward structural topography to rainbow heatmaps of bloodflow and live-updating neural activity, to views that must be exploiting some complicated particle emissions to achieve such detail. Heinz’s head spins. “Wow.”

“So where I think you’re confused,” says Phineas, “is you were looking for an inactive part of the brain, like a restricted diffusion. But if such a major part of Perry’s in there, cut off from the rest, and if it’s alive and healthy, it’s probably in a dream state. Which would be hard to tease out, in an MRI.”

He walks up to the holographic model, swinging a bare hand through it. Brain lobes inch apart from each other at his press. “His agency put something in here, when he was a kid?”

“That’s as much as I got out of Carl. You’re all caught up.” Heinz leans back against the workbench as the colored lights play off the walls of the room. “He said it was like a synthetic biomaterial, maybe -- not a microchip.”

“Ferb, can you highlight uncommon proteins?”

Ferb taps a key.

“Found it,” Phineas says, as he pulls layers of brain matter apart like lettuce leaves. “Looks like it links right up to the commissural fibers. No way would this show up on an MRI, it’s miniscule.”

He carves a section out of the 3d image with a swirl of his finger and zooms in.

“So this is the gateway to the sapient side of Perry,” Phineas explains. “The linkage is cut, but if it was turned on --“ Ferb presses a few more keys, and most of Perry’s brain goes dark, revealing an inner tentacley mass that spindles out of the device. “-- all these brain cells would come back online. You’re right that his brain looks normal,” Phineas says to Heinz. “But that’s because normal platypus brain cells got reappropriated by whatever this tech is. So it’s the same size and shape, just... adapted to make room. His brain would’ve been really plastic, when they first put this into him, so his platypus side became more efficient while his smarter side grew to take up space.”

“Is it like a brain inside a brain?” Heinz asks. “He’s not conscious in there, is he?” That sounds nightmarish, thinking that the Perry he knows might be trapped in his own dark skull, cut off from his senses. Phineas shakes his head.

“This part on its own isn’t capable of conscious thought,” he tells Heinz. “It would need to link up to the rest to cohere. That’s why it’s wired into the junction between hemispheres. Its neuronal activity is at a slightly lower amplitude, which looks a lot like dreaming, but it wouldn’t be a dream he could remember.”

Heinz nods, his brow furrowed.

When he’d first put two and two together that these genius kids who ran circles around and inside Danville were Perry’s actual family, it had made too much sense. A jawdroppingly spectacular super-platypus should have a home life to match, Heinz felt. And it had been a good one, he can tell.

He’s never known if he should feel more guilty or flattered that Perry cut time out of every day to spend with him, away from these kids. It hadn’t been his choice, at least not at first. Heinz had just gotten lucky, getting Perry assigned to him. Incredibly lucky. It was the greatest thing to ever happen to him. Whenever he tells Perry this he just gives him a “you bet your ass” grin, not a shred of humility.

Heinz’s primary goal, in this late phase of his life, is to be the best thing that’s ever happened to Perry. Standing here in the Flynn-Fletcher garage, he feels like he’s falling short.

“Anyway, the critical juncture is this probe,” Phineas continues, pointing out the magnified section he cropped. “All we need to do is figure out its mechanics.”

“Which is where Baljeet can help us,” Ferb says.

“Yes, hello!”

Ferb has spun the laptop so the screen faces Heinz and Phineas -- their friend Baljeet is on video, sipping from a juice box. He appears to be walking down a crowded hall.

“I am traveling between periods now, so I can talk. I was so grateful you shared this data with me, Ferb, my lunch bioengineering class was dragging and I needed something to keep me awake.”

Ferb mouths “lunch bioengineering” to Phineas over the laptop. Phineas smiles.

“I did help myself to your laptop’s microphone, too -- your explanation was very good, Phineas, particularly the skill with which you dumbed it down.”

On his plush bed, Perry is pushing himself up -- he shakes his helmeted head, makes a grumbling sound. Before Heinz can walk over to him Phineas is there, soothing a hand under the chin straps -- “There there, boy. We’ve got enough out of you, thanks.” He takes the helmet off.

“So Perry is dumb again?” Baljeet asks, cheerful.

Phineas shrugs awkwardly, petting Perry’s head. “He was never dumb, Baljeet. You know that,” he says. “But he’s more like a regular platypus now, yeah.”

“That is so cute! I am sorry I cannot be there to see him,” Baljeet says, “Before he is fixed. I focused in on the probe itself while you were talking. It appears to use the brain’s internal electricity to power a small receiver, which is ingenious. But the receiver itself responds to a code, presumably a radio-transmitted series of frequencies, which I do not know. That is not a problem, however,” he says, “Because with a minimally invasive surgery up through Perry’s sinus, you will be able to bypass it and flip the connection back on yourself.”

“Awesome. Thanks, Baljeet,” says Phineas. “Ferb?”

Ferb has appeared a wheeled rack of surgical tools and anesthetic equipment. He snaps on a mask and experimentally clicks on a miniature drill.

“Wait,” says Heinz, hurrying forward -- his stomach twists at the suggestion of what they’re about to attempt. “I don’t think this is the best idea.”

“Don’t worry, we know what we’re doing,” says Phineas, with a reassuring nurse’s manner. “We won’t know for sure it worked until he wakes up in a few hours. But it will.”

“But that won’t fix the bigger problem,” Heinz tries, desperate. “OWCA disabled the switch in all the agents’ brains. This will fix... what, just him? What about the other animals? Carl said they put this in every one of them, or at least most, I guess,” he says. “So maybe Perry the Platypus is more... developed, but there’s who knows how many animals out there who are stuck like him right now. Freaking out their families.”

And he doesn’t want these boys to drill a hole in Perry’s head, is the unsaid half of this. But that reasoning wouldn’t slow them down.

Ferb blinks and lowers his mask. “Well. That wasn’t in the email.”

“Oh no,” says Phineas. “They’re putting experimental brain implants in all those animals? Is that part of what the lawsuits are about?”

“Oh yeah. I mean, I have no idea, actually, but probably.” He pauses. “Wait, you boys know about that?”

The federal government has made every attempt to hush up OWCA’s recent legal problems with big cash settlements. Heinz only hears about it through Perry; it isn’t in the news.

“Candace picks up a lot of gossip in the field,” says Phineas with a small smile. That’s Vanessa’s friend, at law school. Heinz misses seeing her around. “Anyway, it sounds like we’d better shift gears, huh Ferb?”

“If this is our preferred course of action, I have an observation,” says Baljeet from the laptop. “It is about the device. The neuron-rewriting mechanism is impressive, yes, but the choice to create a single point of failure at the probe is downright boneheaded. Not to mention morally impugnable, when the very state of self awareness is on the line. If you do not mind the comparison -- it reminds me of your inventions, Mr. Doofenshmirtz.”

Phineas tilts his eyes up to Heinz.

“Yeah, you’re not wrong. That’s classic villain design philosophy,” he says. “Which doesn’t surprise me. OWCA steals all their technology from villains. We’re giving them free labor -- it’s a racket, honestly. Crushes your spirits. It’s enough to make you quit evil, which, y’know. Is the avenue I personally endorse.”

“Do you know who made this?” Phineas asks. “Like, the original inventor?”

“No,” says Heinz. “But OWCA’s had their agent program for decades, who can say? OWCA never gives credit. Or residuals.”

“There might be archival files,” says Ferb.

“Yeah, we gotta get over there,” agrees Phineas. “Doctor D, Carl would probably let us in the building, right? Should we carpool?”

“Shouldn’t we fix Perry surgically while we have him here? Oh wait,” says Baljeet -- and Phineas responds, overlapping him as they say the same thing: “We need him to test the signal.”

“Jinx,” says Phineas.

“It is not jinx! I am speaking ahead of you, but there is a sound delay,” Baljeet replies, victorious. “My class is starting now, I wish you all success. I am sure Perry does not appreciate being mentally reduced. I know I did not.”

Phineas blinks over at Ferb, his mouth hanging open. “You mean after that... time you tried to kill us? You remember that?”

Baljeet laughs like a Christmas elf. “Yes, I remember everything! Goodbye!”

And the video shuts off.

---

Ferb rides shotgun as Heinz winds through the Danville lunch rush. “You got Carl’s number?” Heinz asks. Ferb doesn’t. “Should probably shoot him a text,” he says, handing over his phone.

Ferb opens Carl’s text history. “Yikes,” he says at the recent photo. “Don’t let Phineas see this.”

“Hm?” asks Phineas from the backseat. He’s with Perry.

“It’s highly graphic imagery, which would only upset you,” says Ferb.

“Mm,” says Phineas. In the rearview Heinz can see him pulling fingers through Perry’s fur, craned forward to ensconce him. They’re almost nose to nose, Phineas soothing out nigh-subaural reassurances to Perry, pouring his gentle gaze into him.

It’s not how Heinz is with Perry, but Perry is never like this, with him. Never a baby animal. Heinz has seen bits of Perry petmoding with Phineas and Ferb when they visit the Flynn-Fletcher house, Perry jumping into their arms for cuddles, but he feels invasive spectating this intimate affection, and Perry doesn’t tend to indulge it with Heinz in the room.

Perry lacks such self-consciousness now, so he pushes into Phineas’s petting hands, a platypus purr in his throat. It’s the first time he’s seemed genuinely happy since all of this started.

They pull up at the front curb. Phineas exits the car, slamming the door as he runs up to the building entrance. It is a de facto assumption that he will be carrying Perry through the day’s events. Heinz will not contest this.

“It’s not just you,” says Ferb. Heinz looks over, as Ferb holsters his backpack and makes to exit the car. “He’s a bit tetchy today.”

---

There’s a ransacked quality to the OWCA lobby, Heinz observes as he steps inside. The outmoded wood-panel interior echoes their footsteps as they walk the short distance to the cubicle farm. He realizes, feeling slow on the uptake, that there are no animals. A few teenaged interns hasten from office to cubicle and back, throwing them friendly but exhausted waves.

Heinz spots a rust red puff of hair -- “Carl! Hey, Carl!”

He’s hunched over an intern’s computer screen, peering past their shoulder. At Heinz’s voice, he pops up: “Oh -- you guys are here!”

Carl winds between the cubicle walls to reach them. The moustache is a heinous choice, Heinz and Perry agree.

“You wanted to look at our records, right? Oh,” he says, turning from Ferb to Phineas. “You brought him?”

Phineas has Perry held tight to his chest, in the style of an invisible papoose -- his mouth is an impassive line. Heinz answers: “Of course we did, what, were we gonna leave him at a pet hotel?”

“Makes sense I guess. You guys should be okay with him, we haven’t had any surprise visits from the feds today.” Carl leans in to the teal bundle in Phineas’s arms: “Sorry about all this, Agent P.”

“We’re hoping you have old technical files,” says Phineas, over Perry’s head. “Wherever the neural device in Perry’s head came from, we need records on its design and activation.”

“Well,” Carl leans back to cross his arms. “Agent P and you guys, by proxy, are welcome to look at any files we have -- within reason,” he appends, rubbing an elbow. “Not legal proceedings or financial records, nothing internal. But we have file archive rooms you can hunker down in. If you’ll follow me.”

“I’m guessing this place has no digital records,” says Phineas, as they make their way past cubicles.

“Actually, I was up last night going through our blueprint scans. Monty found a manufacturing date inside the agent control machine -- the one I showed you,” he tells Heinz. “1974. We only have a few dozen blueprints saved from that decade. I didn’t see it in there, sorry.”

“Wow. What foundational blueprints does OWCA still have on file from the 70s, Carl?” Heinz asks. “Moustache trimming protocol?”

“Funny you should say that,” begins Carl, right as he slams into Monogram leaving an office.

“Oh! Damn it, Carl!” says Monogram, as Carl rubs hands across his forehead, wincing. “File for permission before you go barreling down the hall at 10 times the speed limit.”

“It was only a brisk stride, sir,” says Carl, as Monogram ignores him, surveying who he’s with. “And technically those speed limits only applied to the animals, so they’re not even relevant now.”

“No rule is more vital than an obsolete rule, when it benefits me. Carl, what are these kid hooligans doing here?” he asks, staring down Heinz in particular.

“Hey Francis,” says Heinz, with casual hands tucked into his jeans. “How’s retirement?”

“Godawful, thank you for asking, Heinz,” he says. If Carl looks tired he’s a morning poppy next to Monogram, whose face is one wrinkled bruise, white stubble salting it like an overseasoned porkchop. “I’ve been forced to come in just to keep Carl’s fresh new way of running things from buckling an entire branch of the government. Someone has to keep this ship afloat.”

“It’s nice you believe you’re doing that, sir,” says Carl.

Monogram leans in to Heinz. “We’re under the gun trying to snap up whatever human volunteers we can, now the animals are out. Monty’s pulling triple duty just keeping Danville’s evildoers from running the city. It’s cats in the henhouse, Heinz. And Agent D is nowhere to be found.”

“Agent D requested a leave of absence,” pipes up Carl, “to spend time with his sick owner. She’s a grandma,” he explains to Phineas and Ferb, sympathetically. Monogram groans.

“There’s your pie in the sky, Disney movie ethics that have ruined us all, Carl. Letting the agents live their lives however they want, letting their families know. I don’t know why I have to explain to you that requiring the agents’ consent defeats the entire point of using animals.”

Carl closes his eyes. “Sir, promise me you won't say that in front of a tribunal.”

“Pardon,” says Ferb. The others turn to look at him. “We’re in a bit of a time crunch.”

“Oh my god,” says Carl, rubbing fingers into his eyes. “I’m so sorry Ferb, Phineas. Look, the records are just down the hall -- here,” he says, pushing a keycard into Ferb’s hands. “That’ll work on most doors. I can trust you two to mind your business. ...Doofenshmirtz,” he finishes warningly, with a nod at Heinz. He puts a hand behind Monogram’s shoulder to shepherd him cubicle-ward.

“I didn’t just see you do that,” overhears Heinz, as Phineas and Ferb tear down the hall in silence. He runs after them.

Heinz spent long years working for OWCA on and off, before he realized it was a poor use of his time on earth for the sake of proximity to Perry. So the villain record room is not unfamiliar to him, even if he hasn’t spent much time in it. “If they stole that brain tech from some villain in the 70s, and they definitely did,” he tells the boys after he catches up to them, “there’ll be a file on them somewhere in here. Guarantee it.”

“Good. We’ll find it,” replies Phineas, as Ferb cards them in with a beep.

Heinz can’t guarantee that. But he can tell he and Phineas share a stubborn sense of grit right now that no amount of paperwork could dissuade.

The room’s a filthy algal bloom from the 70s, avocado carpets faded brown with decades. Phineas lowers Perry down to the floor, once the door latches behind them. Perry sneezes.

“Wow, these cabinets,” says Phineas, examining their typewritten labels.

“Yeah, I know. How it used to be, kid. ...Ugh,” says Heinz, joining Phineas at the first row of files, which is all “A”s. “I was really hoping they’d go by year.”

“What’s the timespan of the records in here?” Phineas asks, looking up at Heinz. “Does it go up to the 80s? 90s? When did they stop using this room?”

“Um,” says Ferb, holding up a fresh manila folder. He extracts a printout of some villain’s Reddit profile.

Phineas blinks, while Heinz huffs through his nose. “That’s OWCA for you. Making everything hard and everyone’s life harder, even when you’re on their side.”

“Wait,” says Phineas, still staring. “Ferb, that’s great. The folders!” He runs over to the drawer Ferb’s opened, fingering through it. “They all look different -- their age, their designs. You can tell they never replaced any of them.”

“That’s archival malpractice,” says Ferb.

“And it’s gonna save our ass,” Phineas smiles back at him. Heinz is quietly scandalized. Who taught him to talk like that?

They rule out the shiny new options and pare down to a set of mealy carrot-colored folders, which run into the early 80s. Candidates are piled into heaps on the carpet, after which point the kids and Heinz sit down to read through them.

“All these 70s villains did some kind of weird brain experiments,” laments Phineas. “That or something with inaccurately described nuclear science.”

“You’re telling me. It was all that psychedelia in the water,” says Heinz, sitting crisscross by a separate pile of folders. “Every loser with a vendetta thought LSD or atomic radiation was free magic they could use. We lost a whole generation of evil minds.”

He’s skimming past the subject of brains, looking for references to animals. A thin folder catches his eye -- because of its size, really, just a single sheet sandwiched inside. Most of these 70s records are overstuffed behemoths full of questionable neuroanalysis. He flips it open to the vintage piece of paper, headlined “SWANSTRESS”.

A minute later he’s over by Phineas, tapping the folder into his shoulder. “Hey.”

Phineas looks it over. “Strigid Rothbart,” he reads off the label. “You think this is promising? ...There’s nothing in here,” he says, frowning at its interior. “It’s just a paragraph description of a villain. No research notes.”

Ferb leans over to see, disturbing Perry, who was resting up against his thigh. He reads out the villain profile in his lovely British patter.

“Strigid Rothbart, known as ‘Swanstress’, was a figure known to terrorize North Poven County residents in the mid 1970s, up until her last known date of activity in 1978,” Ferb relays.

“Locals report she would drive through the streets to the chilling tune of swan song, and her army of rainbow trumpeter swans would divebomb citizens as they went about their shopping: stealing purses, bags, and vinyl records, and hoarding them in Rothbart’s trademark painted Volkswagon. The music ended on June 8th, 1977, when citizens described an apparent mutiny: the swans divebombed Rothbart’s car until she drove off for a final time, leaving the town in peaceful silence.”

Heinz nods vigorously, crouching down to where the kids are sitting. “See? Animal intelligence.”

“I mean... we can’t rule it out,” says Phineas, “but there’s just nothing to go on here. Lots of these villains controlled animals.” He flips the page.

“It’s good local folklore,” says Ferb. “Dad will like it.”

“Ferb,” says Phineas.

Scrawled across the back of the paper is a bevy of shorthand notes, in smudged pencil. The three of them peer in at it, as Perry trots over and bumps into Heinz’s knees. He glances down -- Perry’s doing that staring thing again, like he wants something and expects Heinz to figure it out. Heinz can’t read this changed version of him, can’t know his inner mind -- so he just puts his hand on Perry, hoping it’s the right thing.

The boys are scrutinizing the page. “Thats a squarewave... and a key signature, ‘A’. Ferb, these are synthesizer notes,” Phineas declares, wheeling on him. “We’re looking for a code transmitted by radio signal -- this could be describing what it was!”

“‘5700 MHz’,” Ferb reads. “A radio frequency. You’re right.” Ferb pulls the page closer to both their faces. “But what did she transmit?”

Phineas is thinking again, a smile dawning on his face.

“A code... like a series of notes. Ferb, it’s swan song,” he says. “I mean, that’s her evil villain theme. OWCA thought it was worth mentioning in the write-up, it’s the most obvious thing to go off of. Look up swan calls.”

“Villains are so into their theming,” agrees Heinz. “Which works if it’s iconic. Not so much if it dates you. Sounds like she was a 60s flower power hanger-on.”

Phineas is in an improved mood, kneeling next to Ferb as he cracks open the laptop and starts searching. He looks over at Heinz, who’s awkwardly petting Perry, his bill resting on his leg. “What was your theme, Doctor D?”

Failure is the first word that comes to mind. “Um. Good question. Was going for more of an original brand, I guess. No gimmicks.”

“I think you had a few gimmicks,” Phineas says.

“They were original,” insists Heinz. Phineas’s mouth tilts.

A boistrous honking blasts out of Ferb’s laptop speakers -- he’s pulled up a nature video. Heinz feels more than hears a growl vibrate in Perry’s throat. “Oh -- a treat for the ears,” says Ferb.

Phineas reaches for the arrow keys, tapping forward through it. “That’s not very melodic. Do they have other calls?” He leans back on his folded legs. “Are we sure she had trumpeter swans? Maybe it was a different species with a more iconic song and they got it wrong.”

They play video after squawking video, but no distinct melodies emerge. Heinz reexamines Rothbart’s folder.

“Music aficianado, rainbow birds, possibly she dyed their feathers herself, hippie car with a custom paintjob... man, I’d give anything to see her hair, I just know it was insane.” He strokes Perry’s head with his thumb, soothing the swan anxiety out of him. Do swans eat platypuses? Well, at the very least they’re probably rude to them, he figures. “‘Swan song.’ There’s an ancient Bee Gees song called that, it gets stuck in my head all the time.”

Ferb and Phineas both still. “...Is there?”

“Yeah.” He hums the hook. “Back before disco, when they did that kind of whimsical harp-based storytelling. It’s from a super cheesy album, not good.” He’s listened to it dozens of times. Heinz can’t resist that syrupy 60s music. It was in his heavy play rotation in the 90s, whenever Charlene couldn’t talk him out of it.

Phineas grabs the sheet back. “She was into music, stealing records from people. That... could actually be it,” he says, looking at Heinz with surprise in his eyes. “Ferb, can you look up what key the song’s in?”

Ferb starts playing it to check. “A.”

“Huh.” The song plays on. “...Do you think she blasted this when she drove into town? Is that what the story was implying?”

Ferb looks contemplative as he listens. “That would be chilling.”

“Well, it’s the best thing we’ve got,” announces Phineas, standing up. “We may as well test it. Either it works or it doesn’t. The machine they used, that turned off Perry’s brain,” says Phineas as he turns back to Heinz. “It was right here at the agency?”

Heinz nods -- he lifts Perry off his knee, gingerly, so he can get off the carpet. “That’s what Carl said.”

Phineas stares ahead. “Does OWCA have a radio tower?”

---

The transmitter station is a grey cinderblock structure, lodged in a weedy field out back.

Heinz follows its antenna up into the flinty sky, which has eyelets of blue peeking through. You never notice these things until they’re relevant. He’s probably sent scheme-related signals into those receptor dishes up there plenty of times, without thinking about it.

Phineas waits on the cement deck as Ferb tries the door. “The coax cable runs from the building to here,” he explains, “and if we’re nullifying yesterday’s signal, we’d better use the same exact equipment. Same broadcasting range, same wattage.”

“We’re gonna destroy the machine after we re-build it, right?” asks Heinz. That’s something else he knows quite a lot about. “I mean, there’s no way we’re letting anyone else switch the agents off. After we switch them back on.” Positive thinking.

Ferb’s keycard works, and the door swings outward. Phineas heads inside, holding Perry. “We’re not building anything. We just need to plug in to the transmitter. Ferb can use his computer.”

Modern technology. Man. That thing couldn’t fit through a door.

It’s cramped but kinda cozy inside, a table set up with an abandoned coffee mug, cushy black headphones plugged into jacks, little square window with the dustiest hen-patterned curtain, clearly meant for a kitchen. The rest of the interior is filled with ceiling-high machines covered in dials and knobs.

Ferb props his laptop on an old button-dotted brick of a device and opens some musical software. He jazzes his fingers across the keyboard, and then plays the 5-note melody from the song. Heinz jolts -- he looks at Perry, who is crawling along the tabletop, sniffing the coffee mug. No -- that won’t affect the device in his head, Heinz realizes, as his panic melts into relief. They need the right kind of signal.

“Okay,” says Phineas, flipping on a select few of the big machines, including the one they’ve hooked the laptop to. “Frequency’s at 5700. We’re good to go. I think.” He pauses -- Heinz sees his lips moving silently, like he’s running down a checklist in his head.

He touches the back of Ferb’s hand. “Don’t play it yet.” Phineas turns to Heinz. “You said this hit all of the agents? One radio signal wouldn’t have a global effect. But OWCA sends their operatives all over the world.”

“I don’t know. It went as far as Seattle,” answers Heinz.

Phineas and Ferb look at each other, then out the curtained window at the sky, in comic sync.

“There’s lowlying cloud cover today,” says Phineas. “That’d weaken the signal. It was clear yesterday, which is when Perry got hit, right?”

Heinz nods slowly, returning to that late afternoon in the orchard. “Yeah. Mostly. There were a few clouds.” They’d been burnishing orange in the sun’s low glow, like campfire marshmallows, right before everything went wrong.

“It’s moving east,” informs Ferb from his laptop, ever busy. “And quick. We’re right under the terminus of today’s cold front.”

“So should we give it half an hour?” Ferb nods at Phineas. “Okay.”

They leave the transmitters warm and humming inside as they camp out in the field. Fresh air is a boon -- that room was gonna become a hotbox of Heinz’s own sour nerves, if he hadn’t escaped.

Phineas and Ferb sit in the grass chatting about the radio signal, what they’ll try next if their Bee Gees theory isn’t right.

“You think the guys at OWCA really just copied her code?” Phineas asks, leaning back on his palms. “That seems pretty braindead -- maybe they changed it to, like... Major Monogram’s favorite song, or something.”

Heinz is glad to realize he doesn’t know what that might be, off the top of his head. He’s sure it sucks.

“We could also brute force it,” offers Ferb. “If we look more carefully at the brain probe we could determine how many bits it can store. Then we’ll at least know how many notes are in the sequence.”

They carry on like that, riding the high of speculative sleuthing. Heinz is puttering through the grass looking out at the fenced-in field, at the back of OWCA, hands in his pockets. His stomach is a sick knot of fear. He might get Perry back tonight. He might not.

He toys the ring.

“Would you like to suggest any other possible solutions to the code, Mr. Doofenshmirtz?” Ferb calls out, asking. Perry is sitting in his lap for a change.

“Oh... no, I gave it a shot, kids. That’s all you’re getting out of me.” He crosses his arms uncomfortably as he scuffs through the damp weeds in their direction, not sure how to be an adult in this situation.

“Would you like to hold Perry?” Ferb asks, as though that was in fact the original question. Phineas and Heinz shoot him the same wide look.

“...I don’t know,” says Heinz, honestly. He does and he doesn’t. But he walks up to the boys and takes a seat with them, there in front of the radio building. The clouds are rolling over. Perry is splayed across one of Ferb’s legs, his eyes shut as Ferb scratches around his ears.

He is so like a cat, this way, all his concerns met with a sated stomach and loving touches on the back of his head where it’s hard to reach, especially now that he’s forgotten how to use his arms. Bearing witness to this pure, uncomplicated love scalds Heinz, because this is Perry. He feels like a demon warded back by the light. His own love for Perry is so, so complicated. And he can’t simplify it.

“This is how he used to be,” Phineas says quietly. He reaches out to hold Perry’s paw, which is dangling over Ferb’s knee. His digits lack the adroit tension Heinz is used to seeing, curled softly under. Phineas’s slender thumb prods at the reduced webbing beneath his forefingers. “The vet used to tell us we had to trim his claws, but we never did -- they were always fine,” he tells Heinz. “I figured wherever he went in the day he was wearing them down, digging holes and running around on the pavement.”

Heinz nods. “He files them,” he says. Phineas’s mouth tightens, not quite in a smile.

Ferb says: “The vet did not tell us how to recognize signs of metrosexual self-grooming in our pet.”

Heinz sputters. Phineas sighs and hangs his head in theatric despair, grinning down at his lap despite himself. “Ferb.”

“The signs were definitely there, though,” Ferb continues, raising his eyebrows. He looks at Heinz. “He did always appreciate scarves, which I found noteworthy. High on our pet’s Christmas wishlist, were scarves. That’s the impression I got anyway.”

Heinz wants to laugh at that, and starts to, but it’s like twisting his ankle mid-step when he remembers the dirt caked Merino scarf back home, abandoned in the apple basket. Perry is squirming out of Ferb’s lap at both boys’ weird and inconsistent pettings -- he grumbles cutely. Phineas leans over to pull him into his arms. He looks up at Heinz, as though asking for permission, checking to see if he does want to hold Perry. Seeing no objection, he hugs him fully into his chest with a muted sigh, squishing his face to the top of his head.

“I know you miss him like this,” says Heinz. Phineas turns his head, slowly.

“...No,” he says. “Maybe I used to. When I first found out. I thought it was all fake, him being our pet. Like he didn’t want it, that’s not who he really was.”

Phineas settles Perry on his legs, his arms crossed in front of him.

“But this is him. That was him. It just wasn’t the complete picture.” He rests his nose on top of Perry’s head. “I’m glad there’s a bigger one. And I’m glad he let me see it.”

So much of Perry’s bigger picture is an unflattering full-size portrait of Heinz Doofenshmirtz, dangling by his pants off various cliffs and screaming more often than not. That takes bravery to confess, Heinz knows it.

Perry’s confession had been bidirectional, though. Heinz thinks about this as he watches this sacred side of Perry, in the protecting arms of the kids who raised him. He gets to be something else with them, something he can’t be with Heinz, something neither of them want. Something Heinz never got to experience for himself -- maybe that’s part of Perry’s unwillingness to show it to him.

It waters Perry’s soul like spring rain. Despite the day’s anguish and pain, despite the all-swallowing dread that Heinz might never get to speak with his life partner again -- there’s solace in seeing the life these boys pour into him.

Ferb looks up at the blue sky. “It’s looking pretty clear now,” he says. “We should try the signal.”

---

Pinky the chihuahua awakens with a start. He’s sleeping in the sun on the TV room carpet, like usual -- but he feels remarkably well-rested, like he’s slept all day. He stretches his paws, shakes out the fatigue, and takes a glance at his watch. Isabella will be home from school soon, which is exciting. Pinky hops up the bench to look out the front window, wagging his tail, waiting for her.

Chapter Text

Heinz fumbles the key into the lock. Perry, still groggy, digs knuckles into his eyes as he follows him inside.

All around is the embarrassing detritus of the day that felt like a week. Machine parts scattering the floor for the cumbersome MRInator that had proved so pointless, the tool bag and belt for an aborted espionage mission by the door, uncleaned dishes in the sink, a litterbox Heinz will have to hastily put away before Perry sees it, no idea if he remembers, hopes he doesn’t.

He runs off to do exactly that, telling Perry to wait. Perry stands in the foyer, holding his elbows. The floor’s cold under the skin of his feet -- it’s a real autumn day, finally. Perry bears cold much better than Heinz, but Heinz can be negligent of his own comfort in this department, lets it affect his mood, makes himself crabby from too much cold or heat when the fix is right in front of him.

Heinz finds Perry up on the sidetable adjusting the thermostat when he returns.

“Giving up so soon, are we?” he mocks, like Perry isn’t doing him a favor. “And after I knit you all those nice sweaters, Perry the Platypus.” Perry crosses his arms, perched off the edge of the table, and kicks out his foot to snag it in Heinz’s shirt material. It’s dusty and acrid, and Perry can smell the day’s nervous sweat on him, now dried. Grass blades decorate him in a few places. His greying hair’s a wreck.

Perry sighs, with his feet propped on Heinz’s stomach, and runs a hand up his own head -- it feels unnatural coming in without a hat to remove. He finds a grass blade in his fur, too, and picks it off.

He signs to Heinz: I need a shower.

Heinz nods down at him. “That’s probably a good idea. Been a long day for you. Trust me.”

Perry continues, reaching his free hand out to Heinz’s chest: You need a shower.

They take one together in shared quiet, Heinz sitting on the no-slip geriatric chair, Perry perched on its armrest, leaning into his shoulder. The chair is only so Perry has something to stand on, Heinz always tells himself.

He rubs pet-safe soap through Perry’s fur. It’s hard to place why this feels so different from idle petting. Maybe it’s Perry’s arm hooked around his neck, maybe the wearily contented sighs he makes as Heinz pulls fingers across his back.

They switch, Perry lathering a palmful of human-safe shampoo into his scalp, as Heinz leans forward in the chair. It feels heavenly.

Outside, Heinz dries and dresses in a terrycloth robe. Perry pops his head out of a hefty towel, a quick shake to clear water from his ears.

“Sorry about all the mess,” Heinz calls, heading into the bedroom. “I’ll clean it up, I just... gotta sit down for a minute.”

When he comes out in a clean set of clothes, he sees Perry running a hand up his wrist, looking down at his splayed fingers. “Oh!” says Heinz. “Right.”

He returns and kneels in front of him. “Here,” he says, taking Perry’s left hand and sliding the band back on his finger. “It was just a technical necessity,” he explains. “No hard feelings. I’m not leaving you, Perry the Platypus. You’re not off the hook yet.”

Perry stares at Heinz -- still enigmatic just what’s in his head, but layers of feeling glimmer in the warm dark of his eyes. He glances back down and lifts his wrist, brandishing it. He signs: I was just wondering where my watch went. Heinz scoffs, laughing.

There’s nothing good in the kitchen. They agree on a pizza, loaded up with artichoke and feta -- Heinz places the order while Perry sorts through the basket of apples. It’s much emptier than he remembered it -- the past day is a blur, more a series of emotional states than discrete memories, a sequence of places with distinctive smells. A warmth of being held.

When Heinz hangs up Perry lobs an apple at him, which he barely catches. “You want me to spoil my dinner? It’ll be here in like 40 minutes.” Perry narrows a hard stare at him -- he needs to do this, when Heinz hasn’t eaten. Heinz sighs and bites into the apple.

“You want music?”

He goes over to the wooden record hutch, stacked with old vinyls. He doesn’t collect new ones, really, just holds on to his favorite antiques. The octave-traversing croons of “How Deep Is Your Love” spin out of the built-in record player.

“Did I ever tell you this song reminds me of you?” Heinz asks. Perry smiles up at the ceiling -- he has, actually. But he doesn’t tell him that.

So that is their evening, sitting in the living room, conversation thawing out between them as the night pulls in and they eat their pizza. Heinz taps his foot as the B side winds down with “You Win Again”.

He wonders what Peter and Mystery are doing, over there where the day is a few hours younger. He already got the confirm that Peter’s better, a succinct thumbs up emoji in his texts. He doesn’t know which of them sent it.

It’s a consequence of the OWCA program shuttering, that no more animal agents will get to exist like Perry. He’s already a rarity, since these past years they’ve dialed back their manipulation of the animals, switched to more orthodox training methods. And the brain enhancement, too, Heinz has now learned. The technology’s still out there, so someone will use it eventually, make more smart animals: evil accomplices, or drones in some new secretive branch of the government. The exploitation will go on, as long as there are animals to exploit.

Perry pulls himself back against Heinz’s chest on the couch, the tiniest spoon. Heinz tugs a stripey afghan around them both. Perry is a unique person, who was allowed to happen. And he happened to Heinz.

They hug close in each other’s heat, as the record stops.