A/N: Although I've seen a fair few stories about our dimension's characters post-events of the movie, I haven't seen too many people deal with the characters from the second dimension (alt. Dr D is basically the only one from that dimension I've seen so far). I thought it might be interesting to write from their point of view... particularly Isabella, since she was so different - war-hardened, even. It was an interesting concept to play with, anyway. Hope you enjoy the first chapter...

"Isabella!"

Not five paces from the safety of her front door, Isabella tensed at the call. Across the span of a single heartbeat, a tactical list of every possible offensive manoeuvre flashed through her mind. Time seemed to slow as she steeled herself to defend against an attack, clearing all distractions from her mind and bringing about a cool aura of calculated determination. With a surge of quiet hostility that sent adrenaline rushing through every muscle, she whipped around to face her assailant, hands raised in a defensive position should she need to use them.

To her surprise, though, it was only a familiar young Indian boy on the sidewalk, with a larger boy in tow. Isabella's hands fell to her sides, the threatened flare dying out. The adrenaline with no outlet gave her a sensation of physical weariness. Even a year after the SNAFU with the alternate dimension, the old resistance habits of self-defence were hard to break. It was easier to just be constantly on her guard.

"Doctor Baljeet?" Isabella ventured, her sense of alarm still raised warily. She had not seen him since the final resistance meeting after the official capture of Doofenshmirtz—over a year ago. Most of the kids had gone their own ways after the fact, having seen each other more as old allies than as friends.

The Indian smiled wistfully. "It is just Baljeet now. I suppose that I am no longer a doctor now that the war is over. It was basically a show for the resistance, for all intents and purposes." His appearance reflected it, too. Though his curly hair was still styled upward in a strange sort of peak, he had done away with his grungy lab coat and Dooferalls to wear simple grey slacks and a polo. The effect was somewhat disillusioning.

Isabella lifted her gaze to scrutinize the other arrival. Buford, of course. She restrained a sneer. Buford was dressed in clothes not unlike his old outfit, with cargo pants and a tight black shirt that revealed the solid lines of muscle. His hair had been grown and cut to a uniform length, leaving no evidence of the former mohawk. His gray eyes were still as hardened as ever, but his general demeanour was somewhat softer than it had been in his "resisting the resistance" days.

"Sup," he growled in what Isabella supposed to be a friendly greeting.

"Not much," she responded coolly. It was hard to forgive a person for ditching their operation in the heated stages of struggle. Out of pure stubbornness, the moron had decided he was too good for their resistance group and decided to resist them. It hadn't entailed much more than piddling acts of vigilante justice independent of rhyme or reason, but the treachery still burned Isabella.

Baljeet, whose eyes were darting between the two steely glares with a nervous expression, decided to intervene. "How have you been, Isabella?" he cut in with a higher than normal voice. "Keeping busy?"

Isabella allowed a brief, humourless smile to cross her features. "I guess." If by busy, he meant holing herself in her room to design battle plans for hypothetical attacks on their city, then yes, she had been very busy. Even so, she too had exchanged her resistance wear for something less militaristic: denim jeans and faded tee-shirts. It felt too casual—wrong, somehow, as if she was shedding the protective coat she had worn for so long. But the fight was supposedly over. There was no more need to dress the part. Though she had changed her outfit, however, she had chosen not the discard the persona.

"I almost miss it," Baljeet said with a chuckle. "Not the oppressive dictatorship, of course, but I miss the feeling of fighting back against an evil force. It was very liberating. Ironic, isn't it?" He walked up her front step, keeping back several paces. His face bore a sort of longing. "I was surprised at how difficult it was to move on from it all."

He had hit the nail on the head. Isabella nodded curtly. "I know. I think we're all having a hard time moving on." She gazed in the direction of her bedroom, imagining its current decor. During the old rule, creativity and cheerfulness were outlawed; as a result, most things became drab. Her room was a prime example: dull walls, dull carpeting, no decorations of any sort, and a closet with mostly empty hangers—the Dooferalls had been the first to go. The only furnishings were a bookshelf containing a lone stuffed dog, tattered with age, and a cot-style bed with a single pillow and a thin coverlet. In the past year, not much had changed. The outfit switch had been enough for the time being, and even then, her resistance wear was still stashed in the corner of her closet... just in case.

"Yeah," Baljeet responded.

They both fell silent for a moment, dwelling on the past.

"Maybe we should all get together sometime," Baljeet finally said.

Isabella, not believing his words, fixed Baljeet with an even glare. He withered visibly. The idea of hanging out—a friendship rather than an alliance against an unspeakable force—was foreign to her. Not only that, but it was unnecessary. She had been doing just fine on her own. It had been difficult enough to invite someone into her circle of trust during the days of Doofenshmirtz's rule, but forming allies had been absolutely necessary for the resistance's sake. It wasn't anymore, though.

"I... I thought it was a good idea," Baljeet murmured, tearing his fearful gaze from her direction "What better way to get into a normal routine than to behave like people in a normal situation...?" From the gradual fading of his words, Isabella could tell that, under her fierce stare, he was beginning to question his sanity at having proposed the idea.

Isabella crossed her arms, slipping back into her haughty, defensive posture of the resistance days with the ease of putting on an old sweater. She reprimanded herself for not having determined his motives from his willingness to hang out with someone like Buford outside of necessity.

"Thanks, but no thanks," she declared. "You two can be 'normal' all you want, but I have better things to do." Her cold words flowed naturally enough as long as she imagined that her former colleague was a neutral party, someone to whom she bore neither ill will nor amiability—which, in truth, he was.

With a hastily muttered goodbye, Baljeet scampered away without meeting her eye. Buford rolled his eyes, gave her an ironic wave, and followed the young Indian. After they were gone, Isabella released a long breath, seated herself on the front stoop, and picked at stray blades of grass growing between the patio stones. Even the flora seemed greener and brighter since the tyranny had ended. The once-impenetrable smog had lifted, allowing the sun to shine over a recuperating Danville. Where it wasn't completely industrialized, the flowers were permitted to bloom once more, and their splashes of colour added a rainbow of hues to the local scenery. Even in its stages of repair, Danville was steadily becoming beautiful again. Isabella could barely remember the city as it had been before Doofenshmirtz took over, but somehow she knew that it wouldn't be long before it regained its former glory.

Isabella peered at the fluffs of gentle white cloud in the azure sky and wondered why she couldn't let go. Something crucial was amiss, and until she found it, she could not accept that things were all fine and dandy. There was a certain je ne sais quoi that continued to nag at her subconscious, a constant, invisible burden that kept her on her toes, as if there was trouble. It couldn't be, though. Doofenshmirtz had been imprisoned, the resistance had disbanded, and the only problems Danville had to deal with were petty crimes. There was nothing tangible for anyone to have to worry about.

And yet Isabella could not dismiss the fact that something felt wrong.

She wondered if it was just the issue of friends. Other people had finally begun to trust one another again. Perhaps casual companionship was what her life was missing. She had spent the last year in isolation, never having felt the need to do otherwise. Less than a year ago, the notion of friendship would have been laughable. Their bonds had been born out of mutual loathing for the man lording over them all, not any sense of amity. Just as with the simmering hostility that threatened to break free in the event of an assault, interpersonal attitudes formed under dictatorship were also hard to break.

Some of them were moving on, though. Isabella had seen Candace with Jeremy, the soldier—now ex-soldier, she supposed—from the other side of town. At first surprised that someone as single-minded and emotionless as Candace could even begin to show any sign of affection—apart from protectiveness over her brothers—Isabella's reaction had turned to incredulity. A relationship meant allowing someone your trust, and Isabella, who had been a mere soldier in the war days, couldn't even fathom that. That someone as tough as Candace, her boss, the leader of the resistance, had opened herself up to someone that way was even harder to believe.

Isabella had passed the couple in the park last spring. Jeremy's arm had been wrapped loosely around Candace's shoulder as they sat side by side on a park bench, watching ducks in the pond. The sight of wild animals for the first time in months had been a minor shock, but the show of Candace's intimate side had been far more astounding. Despite Jeremy's chaste gesture, Isabella felt as if she was staring at something deeply personal, like looking into the depths of her formers boss' soul. She had quickly skittered away from the scene, but the image had lasted in her mind.

In a dark, ignored recess of her mind, she supposed that there was the tiniest longing for someone to put their arm around her. Considering how much of a stretch friendship already was, though, the next step seemed outright impossible. Though she no longer had to shroud herself in an indifferent cloak of self-preservation, it was easier that way. To let down her walls enough to call someone a friend already went against her defensiveness; to place her emotional wellbeing into someone else's hands was intimidating. It had been simpler to build up and maintain the barricade around her heart, keeping her emotions both protected and in check—emotions like love were weak and served no good purpose.

Isabella was awakened from her dark reverie by the prickling sensation of somebody watching her. Lifting her eyes cautiously, she saw with exasperation that Baljeet had returned. He kept his distance, remaining on the curb.

With a heavy sigh, Isabella returned to her feet. "Whatcha doin'?" she sniped.

"I just thought you might be interested in knowing a little bit about you from the other dimension."

Her interest was immediately piqued. She had thought little about their doppelgangers from the previous dimension over the past twelve months, but the twin she never met resurfaced in her mind now and then. Apart from the alternate-dimension Candace's backhanded question in passing about Isabella's style choices, she had been given little information about what she was like in their world.

"How would you know anything about that dimension?" she questioned. She took his words with a grain of salt, knowing that he would just love to dangle that kind of bait over her head.

He shrugged. "Although travelling backwards through the dimensions requires many gigawatts of energy, merely observing them is not nearly as difficult. I've been studying their world for the past several months to compare it with ours."

"So, what about me?" Isabella pressed, trying not to reveal how eager she was.

Baljeet almost looked smug that he had captivated her so quickly. "She is a light-hearted girl, not at all toughened like the people in our dimension. She is but a child."

Isabella repressed a snort of disdain. They were all children. In their own dimension, they just hadn't been given a chance at childhood.

"Is that it?" Isabella demanded. She was unimpressed, though she hadn't expected much of her other-dimension self. All of the kids in the alternate dimension were soft. None of them had needed to prepare for, defend against, and face the dangers that she had. She could hardly expect any of them to be particularly interesting.

Except for those two brothers, of course. She had never met two more exuberant, colourful individuals—the quiet one included. They were a shining beacon of optimism in the drab world into which they had been accidentally drawn. She supposed that they had exhibited ingenuity as well in the face of their adversary and the robot army. That sort of resourcefulness was a trait she admired. She almost wished that they had been present earlier in the revolution—they all might have triumphed earlier in that case.

"No, actually." From the demure smile on his face, Isabella could tell that this is what he had been waiting to tell her. "Isabella from the other dimension... is in love."

The image of Jeremy with his arm around Candace flitted through Isabella's mind, and an unmistakeable ache of envy made her heart trip a beat. Almost as soon as the sensation flashed through her, though, it was gone. She reminded herself that love was weak.

"Do you know who she's in love with?" she inquired, trying to mask the lingering fluttery feeling in her stomach with a purely academic tone.

"Actually, I do not."

"You don't know anything about it?" she asked sceptically.

"Well..." Baljeet's smile grew into something a bit more devious. "I do, but I have—how did you put it?—better things to do than share the information. It is probably unimportant anyhow. I just thought you might be interested."

In the space of a second, Isabella had sprinted to the curb and locked the collar of Baljeet's polo in a death grip. She hoisted him onto his tiptoes so that they were nose to nose. "Tell me," she ordered. The piece of her deep inside that continued to smoulder with dreams of a now-unnecessary revolution wasn't beyond using her old interrogation methods to extract answers from a former ally.

Baljeet trembled and placed both of his hands on hers, trying to pry loose her fingers without success. His arrogant smirk gone, he looked at her with pleading eyes. "Isabella, this is not really necessary, is it? I can just—"

"You can just tell me what I need to know," Isabella interrupted, slackening her grip just enough to allow him to stand properly. She wasn't about to let him run free, however.

With a look of resignation and fear that showed just how well he knew that she wasn't going to let him go until he divulged what he had learned, Baljeet cleared his throat. "First of all, it is impossible to see anything in their dimension in great detail. It is like watching a television with bad tuning and poor sound."

"Get on with it," Isabella growled.

Baljeet gulped. "I am just saying that my observations may not be one hundred percent accurate. However, from what I have seen, I can tell that the other Isabella is in love with... either Phineas or Ferb. But I cannot tell which, since she is around both of them almost all the time."

The proclamation stopped Isabella dead. Phineas or Ferb? The boys from the other dimension had been captivating, yes, but not in that sense. And her experience with the Phineas and Ferb from her own dimension had been brief and fraught with a distracting amount of danger. Her first impression of the boys in their world was exactly the opposite of the traits she valued during the time of the resistance: weak, sheltered, and of no great use to their cause. She found it hard to believe that the other Isabella had found something to desire in one of them.

Although...

She recalled the high-tech military outfits donned by the boys during the height of their robot revolution. They had been... an improvement, to say the very least. They could be hope for them yet. And to be fair, she had not seen either of them in a year. There was always the chance that—

"What da heck are you doin'?"

Buford's angry voice cut through her musings. She turned to shoot him a displeased look, only to be met with two strong hands ramming into her shoulders, shoving her away from Baljeet.

Despite the radiating pain now rocking through her arms, Isabella was immediately in offensive mode. It didn't matter that it was only Buford, that he wasn't worth her time, and that she had been the one to incur his rage. The blood pounding in her ears and adrenaline coursing through her veins screamed for action, for someone's posterior to be handed to them on a shiny silver platter. Her fighting muscles had been unused for too long, and this was the perfect opportunity to sharpen her skills once more.

Before she could begin her counter-assault, however, Baljeet placed himself between the two snarling individuals and raised one hand to each, as if someone his size would have any chance at all at keeping them back from each other. Buford was broad and made of muscle, and he could easily crush the tiny Indian boy. Isabella was slender, but she was lean and sinewy, with years of combat training under her belt to give her an advantage. Baljeet wouldn't have lasted two seconds between the clash of the two forces. To his luck, his foolish act of bravery was just enough to diffuse Isabella's aggressiveness to the point where she wasn't about to spring. Her hateful staring contest with Buford remained unbroken.

"Please, can we not fight?" Baljeet begged. "There is no point. We should not be fighting anymore, especially amongst ourselves!"

As much as her bloodlust raged within her, Isabella had to admit that he was right. Buford wasn't worth her time. With the best glare she could muster, she spun around with a flip of her hair and strutted to her front door. There was no thanking Baljeet for what he had told her, or a farewell of any sort. She merely walked away with her pride and entered the house, slamming the door behind her.

Once in her room, she flopped down onto the cot and lost herself in a million different thoughts. Predominant among them, though, was that of love.

Love... it was hard to understand. There had been too much hate, too much evil in her life for love. She couldn't meet other people, let alone fall for them. And even though people like Baljeet and Candace were somehow shedding their resistance ways like old skins and forming genuine bonds with others, Isabella still couldn't bring herself to trust anyone but herself. Everything was just too quiet. Something had to be wrong. Something inside of her screamed that if she let her guard down now, she would only end up getting hurt.

Just like her mother.

Isabella's father was long gone, having left sometime before she could be aware of it. Her mother, however, had fallen for a young man at the factory in which she had been assigned to work. Their affair had been brief. Little had her mom known, the man had been from another, less-organised resistance group. The fool had accidentally revealed himself during a covert mission to sabotage the Normbot factory, and he had been apprehended, and... Isabella didn't want to think what else. All she knew was that the loss had devastated her mother; her mother, who had trusted someone during the war, had only left herself open to hurt when her lover was captured as so many people were in those days. Isabella just counted herself lucky that her mom didn't know about her resistance activities—had Vivian shared them with her lover, there was no saying that he wouldn't have thrown Isabella under the bus to save himself. All of it had only strengthened Isabella's resolve not to let anyone behind the walls shrouding her emotions.

If something bad ever did happen, love would only bring her down.

And yet, right across the street, there was someone that another version of herself had chosen as a romantic partner. Something about one of them had captured her other self's interest. Obviously the other dimension didn't have to worry about the resurgence of a dictatorship, but in a way, it was still her. And the other she had fallen in love with someone who also existed in their dimension. It was entirely likely that the two dimensions were independent of each other in terms of emotions, but the seed had been planted in her mind regardless. And as impossible as it sounded, Isabella had to find out. Despite her mistrust of romance, her all-consuming need to investigate something that fascinating wouldn't let her be.

Shamefully, as if thinking that far into it was hypocrisy, she also wondered which stepbrother it could be. Reminiscing on the other-dimension brothers, she compared the two: Phineas, the short, redheaded fireball who was full of ideas, and spunk to boot; Ferb, the man of action who was as brilliant as he was silent, with his curiously forest green hair and jade eyes? There was no preference because she could feel no attraction. Attraction was the first step of love, and it was just as hard to fathom.

Yet, again she wondered what her life was missing... wondered if this could be it.

A/N: Apologies if Isabella seems out of character to anyone. I just figured that, since she's the alternate dimension Isabella, she would be more contemptuous of petty emotions (like love - to her, anyway). She seemed mistrustful of intruders right off the bat in the movie, and even though she sort of warmed up to Phineas afterwards, I assume that she would be fairly uptight about trusting people even after the war. In any case... that's how I decided to write her. Sorry if it doesn't strike you, Constant Reader, as appropriate. Anyhow, thanks for reading! Reviews are love~