Some kind of big author's notes:
The story was inspired by reading a bunch of stories on deviantART with the premise that Perry was now living as a human. The beginning's particularly similar to Savoir by slash-source, because I was particularly inspired by that story. And because I didn't originally intend to post this. Sorry! It diverges afterwards, I promise!

This story is not slash, though. There's already enough conflict without adding romance as well. Besides, I prefer Perry and Doofenshmirtz as friends.

The characters are a bit older than I usually imagine them. They're about twelve. Since the only word on their age is that they're less than fifteen, I think that's plausible.

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It was already too warm to be winter, but still too cool to be summer. The air smelled of flowers, even inside the school bus. And Phineas and Ferb were deep in one-sided conversation about the underwater circus they were planning for the weekend.

Candace, who got off three stops ahead at the high school, leaned over the back of their seat. "Could you guys go just one day without doing something impossible?"

Phineas and Ferb looked around. "I wouldn't really call our projects impossible..." said Phineas slowly.

Candace jabbed her finger at the seat in front of her brothers. "You turned the family pet into the family... brother."

"Aw, Perry doesn't mind," said Phineas, completely missing Candace's point. "Right, Perry?"

Perry looked up from the book he was reading, twisted in his seat, and gave a thumbs up. He'd been human for good since the end of summer, and by now it felt almost normal. Almost. He didn't think it was even obvious that he was a platypus anymore, as long as nobody noticed that his eyes pointed in slightly different directions when he was relaxed. And he still slept on his stomach, with his arms and legs tucked beneath his body. It was much more comfortable than sleeping like a human.

The bus slowed down at the middle school.

"That's our stop!" said Phineas, and he and Ferb jumped off the seat and ran for the door.

Perry followed them. He didn't go out of his way to socialise with the children at his school, partly to reduce the risk of slipping up and saying something he shouldn't, so he usually hung around with his owners - with his brothers. They were his brothers now.

"Huh," said Phineas when they got outside.

He looked around. So did Ferb and Perry. Perry had been there for less than a year, not counting a few school assignment and show and tell incidents, but he had an excellent memory for faces, and he was sure he'd never seen a lot of those kids before.

Phineas hit himself on the head. "Oh, of course! They must be from that school that closed down last week!"

The school in question had made national news when it closed down. It had turned out that almost every writer for kids and teens in the country had used its students as templates for their characters. Apparently it had been the most drama and conflict friendly school in ten states. It was a huge scandal.

Phineas approached a group of boys their age. "Hi, I'm Phineas, and these are my brothers, Ferb and Perry. You look like you're new here." Perry didn't think the boys looked very friendly, but Phineas either didn't notice, or didn't care.

They other boys looked at them calculatingly. Perry looked back, pretending to be sleepy so that they wouldn't see how carefully he was sizing them up. Although Perry loved realistic young adult coming-of-age novels, he wasn't a big fan of kid sitcoms and movies set in high school. But he'd slept in front of the TV enough times to recognise a group of stereotypical bullying jocks when he saw them.

The one in front looked like a leader, and Perry didn't like the disdainful way he was looking at Phineas, or his stance. Perry's knuckles itched. They were big, but they were just kids. He could take them if they attacked. If he was careful enough not to show his true skills, his family would blame his fighting ability on the human transformation, like they had his understanding of English, general knowledge, and love of soap operas.

"You don't look like triplets," said the leader at last.

He was looking at Perry in particular, and Perry looked down at himself. It was probably his dark skin. His knowledge of race was vague, but he knew that skin colour didn't usually vary much between blood siblings.

Other than that, Perry thought his human form looked as much like Phineas and Ferb as they looked like each other. Maybe even more. He had a rectangular build like Ferb, and was short and had a pointy nose like Phineas, though his didn't take up his entire face. Humans didn't normally have teal hair like Perry did, but it was sort of close to Ferb's hair colour.

"Oh, we're not triplets," said Phineas. "Ferb and I are stepbrothers."

Ferb blinked.

"And Perry here used to be our pet platypus," continued Phineas.

The boys broke into laughter, and not the good kind.

"Freak!" said the leader, as all but one walked away.

Perry tried to retain an accurate memory of their faces. He wasn't personally bothered by the laughter and name calling, but it was often an early warning sign of future problems, and it was best to keep an eye on these people from as early as possible, before they could descend into full-fledged villainy.

The boy who'd stayed stared so intently at Perry that Perry looked at the ground. He didn't like being stared at. Being the centre of attention meant being recognisable, and being recognisable was dangerous in his line of work.

"If you're a platypus, why are you black?" said the boy quietly, when his friends were too far away to hear him.

He sounded curious and not sneering, so Perry opened his mouth. He had the feeling that the question was racist, but he didn't know why. Maybe a real human could tell him.

Phineas jumped in before Perry could say a word. "Platypuses are from Australia, of course! So we made him Australian Aboriginal!"

The kid stared at Perry some more, glanced around, and whispered "That's really cool!" Then he ran away.

Phineas looked uncertain. "Wow, they must have had a really bad time at their old school." He brightened. "So we need to give them the best welcome to Danville Middle School we possibly can!"

Perry wasn't certain he was following Phineas's logic. Did he think they were rude and disdainful because other people had been rude and disdainful to them? That sort of made sense. Being bullied could turn a person into a bully. Just look at Doofenshmirtz.

If that was what he was thinking, Perry hoped he was right. The school had quite a few bullies already, but none of them had the influence over others that the leader of this group seemed to have. Some of the weaker children could start hating school if these boys kept to their ways, and that wasn't right.

.

Over the next few weeks, Perry devoted a lot of his time at school to learning about the new students, in case they were dangerous or in danger.

The children s' fiction writers had taken a few liberties with the social structure, but there were still cliques. Four of them, based on popularity and, to a lesser extent, gender.

There were the popular girls, who Perry nearly thought of as future Candaces before he noticed how irredeemably nasty they all were. Then there were the goth girls, and Perry did think of some of them as future Vanessas. They moped around writing poetry and talking about how depressed and in pain they were, and alternated between getting picked on by the popular girls, and making offensive hand gestures at the popular girls. Both groups constantly pulled mean-spirited pranks on one another.

The boys that they'd met on the first day turned out to be the jocks, as Perry had suspected. Like the popular girls, their only interests outside of sport seemed to be picking on smaller and weaker kids. Mostly, they picked on the fourth group, the nerds, who didn't all appear to be very nerdy. They just weren't into sports.

Some nerds were female and some goths were male, but Perry still found himself thinking of the goths as the unpopular girls and the nerds as the unpopular boys. It was easier to put them into categories.

There were some other children from the school who weren't part of any of the cliques, and Perry suspected that the children s' writers used them as their main characters. But they assimilated into the rest of the school so quickly that he nearly forgot about them. They weren't dangerous.

The nerds were more or less harmless, as far as Perry could tell, and the goths were only dangerous to the popular girls. The popular boys and girls were the real problems. They were consistently nasty, like junior villains. Both groups had members who looked like they could be good kids if they stopped copying their leaders, but that didn't look like it was going to happen. They needed to spend some time away from each other. But they wouldn't do that willingly, and Perry couldn't think of an ethical reason to force them.

For now, Perry just kept an eye on the leaders. Phineas, Ferb and their group of friends were safe so far, probably because they were the most popular kids in their grade. And why shouldn't they be? They'd spent the summer making everything from a rollercoaster to a rock concert. But he knew that Brett, the leader of the jocks, felt threatened by them. Amanda, the leader of the popular girls, he was less certain about. Girls didn't hit as much, did they? In that case, they were probably less dangerous.

.

Perry thought about this during lunch in the cafeteria. He'd heard the jokes that the cafeteria food tasted like platypus food, but Perry was completely certain that it didn't. It was too bland, and not nutty enough. It was a shame. He would have liked it better otherwise.

Once he'd finished eating, he got up to leave, and noticed Brett and three of his friends get up as well. As soon as he got into the hallway, Brett and his friends accosted him. "Why were you staring at me?" Brett demanded.

Perry started. He couldn't remember where he'd been looking. As a platypus, he'd always switched off the outside world when he was thinking. It had got him into trouble as a human before. So he just looked at them with a confused expression on his face, hoping they'd elaborate.

"What are you, gay and mute?"

Mute? Of course he could talk. He just didn't see the point most of the time. Brett was right about the other thing, though. "Yes. I am gay." He knew he'd slurred it a little, and probably put emphasis on the wrong words again, but he'd got his point across.

One of the boys gasped, and the other two laughed. Perry scowled. He knew he sounded strange, but he didn't sound that strange. He'd never understand twelve-year-olds and their aversion to basic politeness.

"You really are gay?" said Brett, between laughs. "This is..." Whatever it was so funny that he couldn't get to the end of the sentence without breaking into more laughter.

They were laughing because he was gay? Why? What was so funny about that? It didn't even matter. Perry took his work far too seriously to let himself get distracted by anyone, male or female. Besides, he looked like a kid and thought of himself as an adult. It was probably hard to get dates under those circumstances.

Brett stopped laughing for long enough to shove Perry against the wall, with surprising force. "Who do you think is hottest? Me, Tyler, or Dylan?" The mockery was obvious in his voice.

Perry considered this. He still couldn't figure out what Brett was making fun of him for, and the answer to his question was none of them, because they were all too children. "Ng... You." Maybe flattering him would calm him down. "But..."

That didn't seem to work. Brett put his face up close to Perry's and sneered. "You know what we do to homos?"

Perry said nothing. He obviously didn't understand the situation well enough to have any hope of defusing it now, so there was no point trying. Rolling his eyes at Brett's cliched tough guy lines probably wouldn't help either.

Brett shook him. "I said, do you?"

Perry concluded that this was going to end in violence, and thought it was only fair to warn him. "You don't want to fight me." At the same time, he took note of anything in the hallway that might be useful in a fight, and judged the distance to the nearest set of lockers, which offered a lot of convenient handholds and good vantage points. There was a very useful looking pole propped up against them.

Brett laughed again and drew back his arm to throw a punch.

Before he could finish the motion, Perry stamped on his foot hard and pulled away, keeping all the boys in sight. He raised his arms in a defensive posture.

The boys all charged at once, and Perry threw himself to one side. The floor must recently have been washed, because his shoes slid, which gave him an idea. He sprinted for the lockers and hauled himself up on top of them, as fast as he could. It was imperative that he do this before his attackers recovered. He turned around, grabbed the pole that was leaning against the lockers and jumped forward to see the boys running at him.

Perfect.

In midair, he dropped into a crouch and held out the pole parallel to the ground. He hit the floor and slid, knocking down all the boys as he did so.

Perry turned to check on his attackers. He didn't want to hurt them too badly. They were just kids.

The first thing he was saw was Ms Orange, his English teacher.

"What is going on here?" She didn't look happy.

Perry made a sound somewhere between a groan and a chatter. The situation was getting complicated. He liked it better when all he had to do was fight. At least the boys who'd attacked him looked okay.

Brett stood up, pointed at Perry and said "He attacked us!"

"Self-defence." Was all Perry said in reply.

"Perry, I'm surprised," said Ms Orange. "You were always so well behaved."

Perry didn't respond. He'd said all he needed to say.

Ms Orange turned on the other boys. "You boys don't surprise me at all. You've caused nothing but trouble since you came here. I don't know what you did to prompt one of the most well-behaved boys I've ever seen to attack you with a pole, but if he says it was self-defence, I believe him."

"He's not even a real person!" protested Brett. "He's a platypus! And- "

Ms Orange cut him off. "I don't want to hear it. After school detention. All of you." She looked at Perry. "You too, Perry. Self defence or not, fighting is against the rules."

Well that was a stupid rule. Not as stupid as "any and all parachute pants retrieved become immediate property of Major Monogram", but stupider than "all agents attending the yearly Christmas part must fill out an mandatory evaluation survey".

Still, rules were rules. Perry nodded. Then the implications hit him and he widened his eyes. He had a mission after school. He couldn't stay in detention. But he had to, or come under suspicion. So he nodded again.