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“You sure these are the right guys Mags?”
Maggie had to bite her tongue to keep from snapping at Harry. Of all the ways her life could have gone after applying to OWCA, this was one of the weirdest ones.
“For the last time, yes.” She gave her roommate a quick glare before turning her attention back to their two targets. Maggie loved Harry and Karen, she really did, but her fellow aspiring secret agents could be…a bit much at times. The three had been assigned to the same unit, and formed a decent team, but they unfortunately hadn’t been able to make the cut.
Ever since the strange disappearance of OWCA’s top agent, the Platypus, the organization had gotten stricter, raising the bar for potential agents ridiculously high. After getting the boot, the three stayed in touch, moving in together and planning how to show OWCA they should be given a second chance to be agents.
And thanks to a hint from a cousin of Harry’s who worked for COWCA, they had a great plan.
They were going to find out what happened to the Platypus, starting by investigating his former nemesis: Dr Heinz Doofenshmirtz, one of the founders and current leaders of LOVEMUFFIN, no. 2 on OWCA’s Most Wanted List, and aspiring dictator of the Tri-State Area.
The link between Doof and the Platypus had been buried deep, just like everything regarding the fallen top agent. Every file, every report, every mission record, every photograph of the man had been destroyed, hidden, or removed from any database the trio had dug through, Good or Evil.
Something big had happened, something Doofenshmirtz did made the Platypus disappear, and if they could find out what that was, OWCA would have no choice but to take them back and make them full agents, black bands and full codenames and everything! Maggie was sure of it.
She clung to that surety as she watched through binoculars as the second biggest threat known to OWCA got into an argument with a hotdog vendor. The gangly scientist was gesturing wildly, while his husband, a shorter man with teal hair and a broad build, casually dodged the flailing limbs without taking his eyes off his phone.
The husband, Peregrine, wasn’t too noteworthy; married for about 6 years, on paper he was joint-CEO of Doofenshmirtz Evil Inc., and in practice he was mostly an assistant and bodyguard for Doof. Digging into his past and family didn’t reveal much; it was a bit shocking for a man who brought both himself and his three children into the world of Good vs Evil to be so…boring otherwise.
Outside of having a mean left hook, Perry Fletcher-Doofenshmirtz didn’t really do much.
“These guys made the Platypus disappear?” Karen spoke up from the backseat, reaching over to steal more of Harry’s fries as she did.
As the aspiring agents watched, Perry wrapped an arm around Doofs torso and lifted his husband off the sidewalk. The taller man didn’t even seem to notice as he was carried to their van, until he was dropped in the passenger seat. If they had the couple’s schedule correct, they were going grocery shopping, which gave them a few hours to investigate the penthouse apartment, place bugs, see what they can find.
It was exciting and nerve-wracking all at once for Maggie, finally getting to put her training to use in a situation with such high stakes.
The three waited a tense five minutes once the car was out of sight before bolting out of Harry's car and towards the back of the skyscraper their targets called home, nearly tripping over each other as they rushed towards the back of the building. A stolen maintenance workers badge gave them a short-cut through the building, and one that avoided more cameras than going through the lobby of the building would.
Unfortunately for them, the utility elevator they were planning to use to get straight into Doof’s lab was out of order, so they had to take the stairs, and they had to try entering through the apartment instead of the lab.
Fortunately for them, it was the last week of school, so the apartment would be completely empty. Maggie thought back to the sparse info they had on the Flynn-Fletcher-Doofenshmirtz children. The two nine year old boys, Phineas and Ferb, were incredibly smart inventors who rivaled Doof in skill but thankfully used it only for things like bioengineering a unicorn-turtle-thing to help their friends Fireside Girl Troop get some kind of badge.
The teenage girls were completely different stories. Both had helped Doof in his Evil schemes before, mostly just standard henchman or bodyguard stuff like Peregrin, and both had started to branch out into Evil like their guardians. The younger, Candace, had a part-time job with LOVEMUFFIN in their legal department, and she seemed to take pleasure in helping their lawyers tear OWCA apart in court whenever possible. The older, Vanessa, had actually led her father and step-father in a few Evil schemes of her own design.
Still, Maggie held her breath as Harry knelt in front of the apartment door and took Karen’s lockpicks from her with the same smug grin he had when he won the rock-paper-scissors game over who would get to open the door. The plan had been going fairly well, aching hamstrings from the stairs aside, but she couldn’t shake her nerves as easily as her fri-
SNAP
A moment later, Maggie was stuck in a net, with Karen’s boney butt digging into her side and Harry squirming under the both of them, dangling in front of Dr Doofenshmirtz’s home.
Oh no.
*****
“Oh! Sounds like the pizza guy’s here!” Phineas’s voice grabbed Ferb’s attention away from the blueprints he was drafting.
Earlier that week he and his brother had tried to help with the small party their last robotics club threw for the end of the year, and somehow their entire elementary school had been turned into cotton candy. Uncle Heinz couldn't even figure out how it did that. But anyway, Ferb, Phineas, and their friends had a bit of an early start to their summer, and they were using the extra days to hang out and do a little planning.
Their friends had been over since that morning, bringing up new ideas for them to try later in the summer and helping the brothers finally settle on what they wanted to do to kick off their summer this year: a city-spanning roller coaster, the coolest one the world had ever seen, complete with (rubber) snakes, a chocolate fountain, the works.
Ferb’s only real worry was that a certain over-zealous agency would mistake their fun for something of Uncle Heinz’s, again, and try to thwart their rollercoaster, again, but hopefully even Commander Contraction wasn’t dumb enough to think a rollercoaster could be used for Evil. Hopefully.
His brother was busy trying to pull the end of his labcoat out from under Buford, who was pretending not to notice so they could keep working on a plan to ‘test the bully-ability of bulls’; whether that meant how good bulls were at being bullies or how easy it would be for Buford to bully a bull himself, Ferb wasn’t quite sure. But since Phineas was preoccupied, Ferb stood to go get their lunch.
“I’ll help!” Isabella hopped up from the couch where she and the other girls in her troop were sitting, and Ferb gave her a small smile as she walked to the door with him; he and his siblings had the best friends, they were lucky.
The sounds of the pizza guy stuck in the trap were familiar, but finding three people in the net and no pizza in sight was new. The three people, two women and a man, froze and gawked at them.
“You aren’t the pizza guy.” He stated, sharing a glance with Isabella.
“Uh, hi there.” One of the women, the smallest of the group with blonde hair, started to speak, but then the red-headed woman gave a triumphant cheer as she untied part of the net. This didn’t let the three strangers out, it just tilted them sideways and dropped them a little lower, leading to a wave of overlapping shouts from the three strangers.
Ferb and Isabella shared a glance. “Should we call your uncles?” She asked under her breath.
Before Ferb could consider that, Phineas was finally able to come over to the door, with everyone else trailing behind.
“Oh! You must be the interns we asked LOVEMUFFIN about!” Phineas stepped to the front of the group, naturally taking charge of the friends like he had for years.
“Yes!” The red-head woman managed to stick an arm out of the net, waving it a bit. “We’re your uncle’s new interns, Maggie, Karen, and Harry, sent by LOVEMUFFIN! Can you please let us out?”
“Yeah!” Phineas nodded back at Baljeet, who was closest to the release for the pizza guy trap.
With a thud the three potential interns landed in a heap in front of their families apartment. As they stood and followed the kids inside, Isabella voiced some questions Ferb himself had.
“I thought you guys only asked for one intern? And that they’d show up next week?” She raised an eyebrow.
“Well, that’s some stuff for us to talk about with our new bosses, right?” The man, Harry, spoke up, eyeing them all with a weak grin and nervous chuckle. “Could one of you kiddo’s go get one of them? Or if the doc and his hubby aren’t home we can come back another time!”
Phineas chuckled, “Oh, a lot of paperwork must have been mixed up on your guys end!” He linked his arm through Ferbs. “Uncle Heinz and Uncle Perry don’t need any interns for their schemes, me and Ferb do!”
Ferb watched as the three potential interns gawked in a very familiar way.
“Uh.” The blonde woman -Ferb was guessing she was Karen but probably-Maggie hadn’t been too clear on who was who- spoke. “Aren’t you guys a little young to be starting a career of Evil and villany?”
“Yes, yes we are!” Phineas responded, before a glance from Ferb reminded him, “Oh! Actually, we only got our uncles to agree to letting us do some summer schemes because we’re almost ten, so no! No we aren’t!”
The adults blinked at them.
“C’mon! We’ll do the interview in the lab!”
*****
Karen looked around, taking in every detail of the lab she could while she, Maggie and Harry answered the many questions that chatty little Phineas had for them. The large room was split in half, one side a fairly standard ‘evil scientist’ lab, and the other looking like an evil scientists lab and carnival fun-house had an unholy love child who threw-up all over the place.
They were sitting in plastic kid-sized chairs across a plastic kid-sized table, getting a job interview from two nine-year-olds who were really, really hard to take seriously. She knew what these kids were capable of on paper, but at the moment she felt like she was babysitting some of her loudest younger cousins. They even had cute little ‘work outfits’; Phineas in an orange lab coat that looked more like an old-timey costume than the modern lab coats most evil scientists wore, and Ferb with purple coveralls and a welding mask that he only lifted when he had something to say.
Behind the boys, sitting in a chair that was actually made for someone older than ten, was the family friend who was babysitting the small army of children, a college kid by the name of Pinky. He was the older brother of one of the Fireside Girls, and much more at-ease being the only person in charge of ten kids than she would have been at 19, but she wasn’t too fond of children. He’d been in a different part of the apartment before the girl with the hairbow had grabbed him to supervise the interview.
“Okay, next up…” Phineas was shuffling through some papers that, from Karen’s view, were a mix of official-looking paperwork of some kind, and papers with crayon on them. He had been asking them a wild mix of questions, from ‘what made you want this job?’ to weird riddles about baseball players to questions about their general mechanical know-how. It was, without a doubt, the weirdest moment of her life.
At least their cover wasn't blown.
And, this might actually be a better plan than spying from a distance. Getting hired, infiltrating DEI, it sounded a lot more fun than being stuck in the back of Harry's car with binoculars for hours on end.
“Harry, what is the importance of adding a self-destruct button to inventions that will be used around Good Guys?” The boys looked at Harry, and Karen bit back a sigh of relief at not being picked.
“Hmmm…” Harry had been taking their little interview seriously, more seriously than he had some of their OWCA training. Maggie had been trying not to explode from anxiety, barely squawking out her answers.
“Probably to keep it out of the wrong hands. Or, right hands?” Harry chuckled at his own joke. “Y’know, cause they're Good Guys?” He elbowed Maggie, trying to get her to laugh with him. She gave him an icy side-eye in return.
“Exactly!” Phineas cheered, “You guys seem like a great fit for us.” Then the boy slumped back a bit, “Now if we could just figure out what we want our first scheme to be, we’d be set!”
“What's got you stuck?” Harry asked, seemingly genuinely curious. “The doc has like, three schemes a week at least.”
“That's the thing,” Phineas started, “Uncle Heinz’s schemes are motivated by his backstories, Nessa’s are motivated by her activism, but we’re having trouble figuring out a motivation to even design a scheme.” The kid pouted a little.
Ferb lifted his mask, looking away from the blueprints he was working on as he spoke, “Everything we think of sounds boring.”
Karen and Maggie shared a glance around Harry; why even start pulling schemes then?
“Well, what does sound fun to you guys?” Harry asked, head cocked to the side. Karen heard Maggie's boot connecting with his shin under the table again. Encouraging two super-smart grade schoolers down the path of villainy was a bad thing.
Phineas and Ferb looked at each other. “Huh, good question.” Phineas put a hand to his chin. “I mean, the heist in that mystery show Candace and Uncle Perry like looked like it could be fun. But what would we even steal?”
Ferb snapped his fingers before adding something to his blueprint and sliding it between the two brothers.
Phineas brightened, showing off a missing front tooth with a bright grin. “Ferb, that's perfect! I know what we're gonna do this weekend!” He jumped up from his chair and grabbed the other boy. “Let's go tell-”
“H-hold on a sec, Phinster.” Pinky stood and stopped the kids from taking off. “Don't y-you two need to finish this first?” He motioned at Karen and her friends with a little jerk of his head.
“Oh, right.” Phineas rubbed the back of his neck as both boys turned back to their little ‘interview’. “You guys answered all of our questions pretty good! The only other thing we had in mind was a practical test, but we weren't sure what to do with that either.”
This time Harry joined in with the look Karen and Maggie were sharing. Practical test? She didn't like the sound of that.
“I have an idea!” A raspy voice brought every eye to the door of the lab. The rest of the kids had, apparently, ignored Pinky telling them to go back to playing in the apartment in favor of spying on the interview.
The boy with the skull shirt, the one who had spoken, was for some reason holding up a bull costume.
“Oh yeah! Good idea Buford. Let's get set up!”
As Karen's wrist was grabbed by one of the chattering kids and she, Harry, and Maggie were separated to do this ‘practical test’, she was wishing they were still in that damn net, waiting for Doof to come home. Hopefully they’d be able to get this over with and get out before anyone else gets home.
*****
Vanessa sat on the curb next to her sister, waiting for Norm to pull up. They were so close to the end of the school year, but her dumbass gym teacher insisted on having her whole last period class still do the whole workout, so she skipped without a second thought. Getting Candace to leave with her without stepping foot in her last period class was easy, but Stacy had been pulled out early for a dentist appointment, so she unfortunately wasn't with them.
They were a few blocks from their school, near a little corner store with artisan sodas and sandwiches that were cheap but definitely underpriced for the quality. Vanessa sipped her root beer while Candace scrolled her phone, absently refreshing whatever social media she was cyber stalking Jeremy on that week. She leaned just close enough to catch sight of her sister deleting a wall of text before starting and deleting and restarting a new message for the blonde guitarist.
“You should just ask him out~” She teased with a little sing-song, lightly elbowing the red head.
Candace jumped, phone bouncing between her hands before she was able to catch it and give Vanessa a half-hearted glare out of the corner of her eye.
“It's not that simple and you know it.”
Vanessa sighed, taking another long sip of her soda. “Doesn’t have to be so complicated either.” She had been trying to get Candace to finally get out of her own way and ask the guy out already since middle school, when it became obvious to everyone except Candace herself that her crush was returned.
It had not been working.
It didn't help that Jeremy was as laid back as Candace was high strung, and seemed to have no plans of making the first move any time soon. It was infuriating, and the only reason she hadn't gone out of her way to give the guy a much needed kick in the ass to take her sister out for milkshakes or something cute like that was because Candace had made her promise she wouldn't.
It was so, so hard to keep from meddling, but she wasn't about to betray her sister's trust like that. So she settled for playing supportive wingman with Stacy and occasionally Pinky and trying to chip through Candace’s worries one word at a time.
Before either of them could say more, Norm turned the corner in car-mode, loudly greeting them as they stood. She never would have thought that Dad adopting the remains of one of his failed schemes would be a good idea, but Norm had pretty seamlessly blended into their weird little family in the last year. The boys had fun finding ways for the ten plus foot murder robot to fit into their games, like making him the Minotaur in the chariot race they planned last summer.
That had been a lot of fun, she and Candace had won as ‘the Gorgon Sisters’.
Norm was a pretty good driver, and had the city map ‘memorized’, so it was a quick trip back home. The maintenance elevator had been trashed during one of Dads schemes earlier that week, so they had to hop out in front of the building and take the normal elevator while Norm decided if he wanted to fly up or just stay in the basement that night. It depended on how antsy his squirrel was feeling in a kid-packed apartment.
The pizza guy hanging in a net with the usual order for their brothers and friends was normal. The extra boxes showing Pinky guessed they would skip school was normal. The kids engaged in screaming chaos in the living room was normal. The three strange adults were not.
“-like that, be meaner!” Buford was barking orders at one of them, a lady with curly red hair, who was standing over a man in a bull costume. “Hit ‘im with another!”
“No, please, no more ‘yo mama’ jokes!” The man cried, curled up in a ball on the carpet. The woman looked mildly concerned, sharing a look with the third stranger who was standing behind Buford and looked more amused than anything.
“Phineas and Ferb, what is going on here?” Candace, being Candace, stepped into the fray, while Vanessa chose to head to where Pinky was standing and watching that days chaos.
“Your brothers n-new interns.” Pinky answered her unspoken question. “Paperwork missha-hap.” He took the pizza boxes from her and headed into the kitchen, catching the attention of most of the kids for lunch. The only kids who stayed, Buford and Phineas, were trying to get Candace to let go of the intern she was interrogating.
With a small sigh, Vanessa went to go rescue the new interns from her sister’s wrath. The three were eyeing her like an angry tiger, while Buford and Phineas were trying to get her to let him go so they could go back to…whatever the hell they were doing.
“Alright Candace, let the guy breathe.” She wrapped an arm around her shoulders and pulled her down the hall, towards their rooms. “What’s got you so riled up?”
“Something is off about those ‘interns’ Phineas is so excited about.” Candace started pacing as soon as Vanessa got the two into her room. The first couple of years after her dads got married and her siblings moved in, she and Candace shared a room when Vanessa wasn’t with her mom, but once they got older Dad and Perry knocked a couple walls down and made it so they had separate rooms with a connecting bathroom.
Vanessa set her bag down by the bathroom door and flopped down into the giant Ducky Momo beanbag-plush monstrosity that had been a Christmas present to Candace from the Flynn grandparents a few years ago. It was as comfy as it was massive. Candace threw her bag across the room onto her desk.
“They setting off your Busting sense?” Vanessa raised an eyebrow.
“Yes!” She threw her hands in the air. “Those three are up to something.”
“Like what?” When Candace’s Busting Sense went off it was never wrong, although it might be catching something pretty tame.
“Like…” Candace’s voice trailed off, and she sat on her bed with a huff. “I don't know. But!” And like that, she popped back to her feet, ready to launch into a speech to convince Vanessa to listen to her, so Vanessa cut her off.
“But when we figure it out, we’ll Bust their asses so hard they won't be able to get the taste of titanium or combat boots out of their mouths for months.”
“Damn right we will!” Candace finally relaxed, sitting back down with a smile.
“Now how about we get lunch before it's all eaten? And then maybe the boys will let us help with whatever they're doing and we can try and get a read on these new ‘interns’ before they leave.” Whatever was going on, their family would figure it out together, but that doesn’t mean the kids would save any pizza for them if they didn’t hurry.
*****
Harry thought the little kids were bad. The teens were worse.
First it was the non-stop glaring from Candace over lunch, then Vanessa suggested they ‘help’ their brothers with…whatever this accidental interview had turned into.
Her idea of ‘help’ involved the two girls with cattle-prods trying to hit Harry and his friends while…Beaufort? was throwing out some really cutting insults from the sidelines, all while stuck in these dumbass cow onesies. And these girls hit hard. If Harry didn't know any better he’d think they had figured them out, but that couldn't be right.
He yelped, bumping into Karen as he dodged a kick to the face from Candace. She hissed at him as they crashed to the lab floor together.
They both tensed at the crackling sound over their heads. The girls were pointing their cattle prods at them, smirking at each other.
A sharp whistle sounded from the doorway. “Now what’s going on in here?” A baritone voice with a thick Australian accent cut above the chaos.
“Uncle Perry! Uncle Heinz!” Phineas cheered.
Harry choked on his own breath. He felt Karen tense up next to him, and Maggie gave a choked squawk from wherever she was. Doof and his little husband were home. He sat up, trying to look casual and not like he had tried to break into this apartment only an hour or two ago.
What time was it anyway?
Harry tried not to let his disappointment show on his face. These guys looked way cooler in their files; up close they looked like a weird high school science teacher and someone’s dorky uncle. But they couldn’t be anyone else.
The scar on Perry’s face was unmistakable; rumor was he got it in a knife fight with a five star rated field agent at the men's wedding, which had of course also been a massive scheme of some kind.
Harry was positive it was from Agent Platypus.
In fact, he would bet what's left of his inheritance that the men had used their wedding as a way to kill the Agent. Maybe even used their kids to catch him off guard before landing the final blow. The timing was right, it just made sense!
Maggie said he was a borderline conspiracy nut, but unless and until his little ‘crackpot idea’ was proven wrong, he was sticking with it.
Harry jumped up from the ground, and started to reach to help Karen up until Maggie beat him to it.
He had been able to get a text off to his cousin about their change of plans, and she had been able to fudge the paperwork and applications they needed and get it to the right places to keep their cover, and if it was good enough for Candace it would be good enough for the two old men.
As he and his friends watched, Doof herded the kids towards the lab to help bring the groceries in from the balcony; the giant robot servant thing the family had flew the groceries up for the men. Perry and Pinky chatted and walked over to the three, shuffling through the paper work the boys had made and used for their interview.
“So, you’re the part-time interns the boys wanna hire?” Perry said with an easy grin, but there was a sharp glint in his eyes that reminded Harry of some of the more cutting instructors back at boot camp as the short man looked them up and down. Harry had to keep reminding himself that despite the Ducky Momo graphic tee and bright orange socks with teal sandals and barely hitting five foot four this man was a brutal opponent, and that look was doing a lot to help.
“Wait, part-time?” Maggie squawked, and Harry blinked when he realized that part. He actually couldn’t remember what hours they had said they were going to be working.
“The boys’ll only need your help when the girls or me’n Heinz aren’t able to.” Perry gave a little sigh, “something we talked about last night that I think they forgot.”
“Oh they definitely forgot.” Doof walked back in, having swapped the tweed jacket over his green polo for a lab coat, the normal white unlike the bright orange one Phineas wore. “Is that still going to work for you guys?”
Harry and his friends stumbled over themselves to say it did. Working with this crazy family would make it a lot easier to find the Platypus’s body, and fewer stake outs would mean fewer chances for Karen to try and talk him into letting her drive his car. He made that mistake once, he would never do it again.
They answered a few more questions, some thankfully normal questions, and then the two men practically shoved the three of them out the door.
Harry, Maggie, and Karen shared a look before silently heading back down to his car, and then driving back to their apartment to rework all of their plans to fit their new cover.
*****
Perry lay back in bed, flipping through the new mystery novel Candace had finally given up; they both knew how fast she could read, she had only been holding onto it for as long as she had as payback for what he wore when driving her and her friends to the mall last weekend.
Worth it.
After the three weirdos had left, the groceries had been put away, and the boys’ friends had all been taken home, they had had a nice family dinner and finished the day off with a low-key family game night.
Low-key for them, at least, so there were lasers and holograms and a vat of acid involved, but it was a fun way to end the day.
He gave a glance up as Heinz finally came out of the bathroom, toweling his hair off with his pajama shirt slung over his bare shoulder.
“So this is going to be an exciting weekend.” His husband slurred a little around his grind-guard, pulling his shirt on as he slid into his side of the bed.
Perry chuckled, scooting a bit closer as they both got comfortable under the sheets. “Got that right, love. Should’a guessed they go for something big like a train heist. And then the first day of summer being the next day?” He gave a low whistle. “Wonder what the anklebiters got planned?” He was going to be taking the girls out for some driving practice that day while Heinz took the boys over to the neighborhood and then ran a few errands for his own schemes.
“I doubt we’ll be able to miss it.” Heinz laughed, before his smile fell a little, “Are you feeling alright?” His gaze flicked down to Perry’s chest, and he realised he had been playing with his locket, twisting and untwisting the chain around one of his thumbs.
He pressed down on the locket, the opening ‘click’ coinciding with his head leaning on Heinz’s shoulder.
Three pictures stared up at him.
One was fairly old; a family of five posed together with an old beloved motorbike. Three boys had their arms wrapped tight around each other and wide, laughing smiles on their faces.
The next was newer by a few decades; a bright summer day, a happy couple on their wedding day, three sweet little kids with bouquets and a younger brother with a heart about to burst from joy around them.
And the last was less than a year old; six people trying to fit on a couch and a robot barely in frame, it was chaotic and messy but everyone looked like there was nowhere else they’d rather be.
“...they should be here.” His thumb ghosted over Linda and Lawrence’s wedding photo. They deserved to watch their kids grow up. They should have been able to meet Heinz and Nessa.
His husband shifted, wrapping an arm around Perry’s shoulders and pulling him close. “I know.”
They sat like that for a moment, before gently shifting back to a more relaxed position and spending a few minutes longer going over the plans the kids had made before turning out the lights and going to sleep.