Chapter Text
---MONDAY---
Phineas hopped off the back of Ferb's scooter, flinging off his helmet and letting off a deep sigh. "Ugh, I can't wait for graduation," he told Ferb, watching as his brother put down the kickstand and dismounted too.
Ferb looked over at him.
"I know, I know. Just a few more weeks," Phineas agreed, rolling his eyes. "I'm just so bored. It needs to be summer already so we can get back to working on our projects full-time again."
A blink.
"You're right; maybe another rollercoaster to kick it off!" Phineas said, finally feeling himself start to shake off the stress of the day. "We'll have to dig out our track-placer, maybe make some modifications to it. I wouldn't want to do a straight repeat of last time."
The two of them dumped their helmets on the workbench in the garage and stepped through into the kitchen, finding two of their dads sitting there.
"You're home early," Other Other Dad said looking between them.
"Mr. McNamara was out today, so the robotics club meeting was canceled," Phineas told them, dumping his backpack by the kitchen hutch, and moving over to the fridge to root around for a snack for him and Ferb.
He heard Other Dad make his rumbling noise, so he turned to look, seeing him sign, ⌈You two have mail by the front door. More college letters.⌋
"I only applied to, like, four schools, Dad," he complained, dumping sandwich fixings on the counter. "I don't know why all these other places think they can get me and Ferb to go there."
Ferb came over and started helping him assemble a few sandwiches.
"See! Ferb's not interested either," Phineas said pointedly.
"Well then, I'm sure the paper-shredder-inator will get plenty of use this month," Other Other Dad told him. "I think it's still out in the shed."
"No, Dad put it in the office the other day," he told him. "When we went through the last batch of letters."
"Why didn't Lenzo tell me?" Other Other Dad whined, turning to Other Dad and draping himself dramatically over him. "What if I'd needed to shred some papers, Perry the Platypus? I wouldn't have been able to. My secrets would've been open to being exposed to anyone who found them. I would've been at risk, Perry!"
Phineas watched as Other Dad didn't even bother looking up from his book sitting on the table, instead just taking another sip of coffee and ignoring Other Other Dad.
He really wanted what they had one day, a loving relationship filled with goofs and easy acceptance.
Maybe with Isabella?
She was his best friend, and both sets of his parents agreed that being best friends with one's partner was one of the most important things. He believed it; they were all such good friends that he couldn't imagine what having parents that weren't was like.
And over the last few years, he'd slowly been wanting to be closer to her than normal friends. He wanted to hold her hand and cuddle with her and surprise her with nice things to watch her eyes light up. Isn't that what wanting to date someone was?
Sure, couples kissed and things, but he felt like the desire couldn't be as strong as some of his classmates made it out to be. He knew a lot of the boys in his class exaggerated stuff to seem cool, so that must be one of them.
Ferb shot him a small smirk and rolled his eyes at their parent's antics before pushing one of the finished sandwiches his way and putting another away in the fridge for Adyson to have once she got home too.
Before they could take their snack out to the living room, Other Dad got their attention one more time, signing, ⌈Call your big sisters today please. Candace called at lunch and wanted to talk to you, and I know it's been a few days since you talked to Vanessa.⌋
"What did Candace want?" Phineas asked, curiosity piqued. "Isn't she busy with school?"
Other Dad shot him a warm smile and signed, ⌈She'll tell you once you call her.⌋
Phineas groaned, "Dad! Tell me."
"Your dad's right," Other Other Dad said, finally returning to a normal seating position. "It's not our news to share." And Other Dad glared at him for that.
Ferb looked between their parents, brow slightly furrowed.
"Fine," Phineas said, realizing he wasn't going to get any more info from them and Ferb couldn't tell what the news was either. "I guess Ferb and I will go call her now."
Instead of sitting down in the living room, they took their sandwiches up to their room, plopping down on Ferb's bed, and Phineas pulled out his cell phone, tapping through to video call Candace then adjusting the phone so both of them were in frame.
"Hi, guys!" Candace greeted, more chipper than usual, a broad smile on her face.
"Hi, sis. Dad said you wanted to talk to us?" Phineas asked.
Candace exclaimed excitedly, "I'm pregnant!"
Fumbling his phone, Phineas barely managed to avoid accidentally hanging up the call when he caught it. "You are?" he asked, surprised.
"Congratulations," Ferb said softly.
He quickly nodded, smiling and agreeing, "Yeah, congrats, Candace! I just wasn't expecting it!"
"Yeah, Jeremy and I weren't really trying for kids just yet, but we're not upset it's happening either. We're actually really excited!" she told them, the camera shaking slightly as she practically vibrated in her enthusiasm. "And you guys are going to be uncles!"
Phineas hadn't ever really put much thought into that before, figuring it'd be a long ways off, but the idea of having a little niece or nephew around to love was already growing on him. He'd heard babies were tiny, but he'd never held one before. Now he couldn't wait!
"Ferb and I will have to make you all kinds of baby stuff," he told her.
"No! No way," Candace said, shutting him down. "I am not having wacky baby furniture made by you! If I let you make it, it'll fly or something."
"Well, no," Phineas interjected. "I don't think adding flight would be safe for a baby."
"I don't care," Candace said sternly, pointing a finger at the camera. "If you want to get things for the baby, I am going to make a registry, and you can go buy whatever you want off of that and not modify it in any sort of way!"
Ferb nodded, so Phineas did too. "If that's what you want," he told her.
"It is," she said with a firm nod and a steely look. "Now I have to get going; I wanted to make sure to tell you guys first, after Mom and the Dads and Vanessa. But I still have to tell Norm and Adyson, and I want to let Stacy and the rest of my friends know too."
They said their goodbyes, and Phineas stared at the black screen of his phone for a long moment after the call hung-up.
He adjusted on the bed to better see Ferb and asked, "Do you want kids some day, Ferb?"
"I think it would necessitate having a partner first," his brother said flatly. "And finishing college unless I want Mum and the Dads to be disappointed in me."
Phineas rolled his eyes. "They wouldn't be disappointed in you," he told his brother. "And you could get a girlfriend. You've dated plenty of girls."
"Never for more than a couple dates," Ferb scoffed.
"Then you just haven't found the right person," he insisted.
Ferb ignored that and asked him instead too, "Do you want to have children someday?"
He hummed thoughtfully and shrugged. "I never really thought about it, but I think it'd be nice. You're right, though, that I'd need to be married first, I guess."
"We're only eighteen. There's no rush to find someone yet," Ferb told him.
"… Do you think it's weird I've never dated anyone?" Phineas asked, mind wandering to other tangentially related topics.
"No," Ferb said immediately and firmly. "Did someone tell you it was?" His brother's expression was looking close to furious now.
"No!" Phineas said quickly, seeing Ferb visibly untense at that. "Just… almost everyone else our age has been on at least one date. And… I've been focused on our projects and our friends and stuff."
"There's nothing wrong with that," Ferb reassured him. "We have all our lives to date and whatnot. We only have one childhood with our friends."
"You're right…" Phineas reluctantly agreed. "I just… wonder sometimes if maybe I'm too late for some things."
"Like what?"
"Well… I think I have feelings for Isabella," he confessed quietly. "But we're about to graduate, and I don't even know if she likes me like that."
Ferb's face flashed a complicated expression that Phineas somehow couldn't recognize – he thought he knew all of Ferb's faces – but before he could ask, his brother was smiling at him and saying, "You should tell her. She's had a crush on you for ages."
"She has?!" Phineas asked, sitting up abruptly. "Why didn't you tell me?"
His lips pursed slightly, and Phineas could tell he was trying to think of the right words and struggling. He was patient while Ferb formulated his thoughts, with his brother finally saying, "I was worried you would make yourself unhappy, knowing and not being able to reciprocate. Isabella was content remaining your friend in the mean time, so I believed the best course of action was to remain silent."
Phineas thought that over for a second. He trusted Ferb's judgment implicitly, so he nodded and said, "Okay. I mean… I wish I'd been told, but I understand why you didn't." He paused another moment, finally eating a bite of his sandwich. "So you think I should tell her."
Ferb shrugged, picking at the contents of his sandwich. "If you're certain you like her, I don't see why you shouldn't let her know. Sure, we're about to graduate, but you'd have all summer to be together, and you can always date long distance in the fall."
"Or I could go to the same school she is," Phineas said. It'd make his decision easy; he wouldn't have to debate which school to accept for.
"Well… I wouldn't go that far," Ferb said.
"No?" Phineas asked, curious.
"I don't think it'd be responsible to base your decisions off of Isabella's simply because the two of you had started dating, especially not that early in a relationship. It's not that I believe things won't work out between the two of you, but if for some reason they didn't, you would be stuck at a school that you didn't even choose, all for a failed relationship," Ferb said. He paused for a moment and added quietly, "… And I had hoped that we would be attending the same school."
Phineas felt his stomach sink, and he quickly moved their plates out of the way so he could lean up against Ferb's side in gentle reassurance. "Hey, yeah, I'm- I'm sorry," he said, stumbling over his words as he tried to get them out as fast as possible. "Of course I want to go to the same school as you if that's what you want. I wasn't even thinking when I said that." He grabbed Ferb's hand in his and squeezed it tightly.
"I know I should've said something sooner, but I didn't… I didn't want to think about us growing up. Not like that – the way everyone expects us to," Ferb whispered into the air between them.
"What do you mean?" Phineas asked. It was rare he couldn't follow his brother's train of thought, but in this situation, he was adrift.
He could tell that Ferb was starting to get stuck again, though, unable to find the words and getting slightly frustrated that he couldn't explain himself, so Phineas just waited patiently, feeling Ferb's hand clench and unclench rhythmically as he worked through it.
"Like… like us and Candace," he eventually explained.
"Oh," Phineas said, finally understanding.
Candace had moved away for college, and at first, she'd come back during summer vacation and at all the holiday breaks, but by her junior year, she'd gotten an apartment with Jeremy, so she was only back for a couple days around the holidays. Then the two got married, and so they had to split holiday time between the two families.
He and Ferb still talked to Candace regularly, but it was all brief phone calls and video chats worked around their schedules and random texts in between. She was still their sister, and she still cared, but it wasn't the same as when she lived with them.
The thought of him and Ferb becoming like that made his chest hurt more than anything.
"I don't want that either," Phineas confessed, even though it felt like it wasn't what he was supposed to say. Everyone grew up and moved away from their siblings and made their own way in the world, right? That was what was normal.
But he couldn't imagine waking up every day and not seeing Ferb first thing, spending their time together building and inventing and imagining, going to bed, and doing it all over again the next day. He knew that every day couldn't be like a perfect summer day, but he wanted them to be as close as they could be.
And that meant Ferb had to be there, because he wasn't himself without his brother.
If things changed as much as their relationship with Candace had, he was pretty sure every day would be like the worst ones in winter, where it was miserable out but they didn't even get a snow day, so it was just cold and wet and awful. Where they couldn't invent or do anything fun.
"Okay," he said, firmly setting his mind to a course of action then and there. "I still haven't decided on a school yet, but wherever you want to go, I will too. We can get our own place by the school with room to invent, and nothing has to change; at least, not the important stuff."
"Thank you, Phineas," Ferb said softly.
"Always, Ferb… You're the most important person in my life, you know that right? No matter how much I might like Isabella, it's always going to be you and me first," Phineas told him.
"You can't promise that," Ferb said, shaking his head. "Everyone grows up eventually."
"I don't care," he insisted. "If growing up means I lose you, then I refuse."
Ferb settled deeper against Phineas's side and smiled slightly. "You're very stubborn, you know," he said. "But I suppose if you refuse to grow up, so do I."
They laid there for a long moment, in contented silence, before Phineas broke it, saying, "I guess I won't say anything to Isabella then."
"Why not?" Ferb asked, sounding confused.
Phineas took a second to compose his thoughts and said, "She probably wants to have a normal boyfriend experience, but… I'm not really sure that I can do that for her and still focus on you and me."
Ferb let out a small noise of disagreement. "I don't think so," he said. "Isabella has known us since kindergarten; I'm certain she knows exactly what she'd be getting if she were to date you. I think you should go for it and that it'll make the two of you very happy."
He looked Ferb in the eyes, making sure his brother was telling the truth, then nodded. "Okay. I'll tell her then," he said, his stomach starting to twist up in nerves. "It should be special, though; she deserves that much. Do you want to help me plan?"
"Always," Ferb answered, already leaning over and reaching for a notepad and the blueprint paper.
By the time they finished their planning session, their sandwiches were long gone, and Phineas could hear Ferb's stomach rumbling in hunger again. Right on cue, though, Mom's voice came calling up the stairs, saying, "Dinner time, boys!"
"We could set our clocks by your stomach, Ferb," Phineas teased as they headed downstairs.
Since they were around more people, even with it only being family, he just got a shrug and a shy smile in response.
Ferb was only ever truly chatty around him.