Author's Notes: We're almost done...!
TW's: Past self harm
Ch22 Posted On AO3 09/04/2020
Perry huffs. Why does this dimensional science stuff have to be so confusing? It sounded so simple when Heinz explained it earlier. All these crazy things with "dimensional energy" and "gigawatts of electricity" are more confusing than the international laws regarding cyber crime. And those are confusing . There's a reason Perry doesn't work in the cybersecurity division.
Even the blueprint is fairly intuitive, other than all the long science words and missing pieces. Ferb could take a couple hints from Heinz- he tends to use more abbreviations than full words, which makes things confusing to say the least.
After the tenth time he has to google some long and unpronounceable word, he swears that he's never going to get involved in something like this again. If another scheme smells like disaster as much as this one did, he's going to just thwart it as fast as possible, then leave.
If something like this ever happens again. It's entirely possible that this plan won't work, and Heinz will be trapped in that dimension forever.
He can't think about that. In fact, he doesn't want to think about that. If Heinz doesn't get back then he'll...well, he doesn't know what he'll do, because he refuses to think about it.
A part of him wishes that Phineas and Ferb were here to help him. They'd get the invention built in no longer than a montage (only a scene flip, if the rest of the gang is helping with it), and it would work perfectly on the first try.
But he can't have them here, and not just because of his secret agent-ness.
No, Phineas and Ferb think of him as cool Uncle Perry, who works for the government and startles easily (and happens to be trans). Ferb knows a bit more, but not much, since Perry went off to college before he was old enough to really remember much. And despite Stacy knowing his cover, Candace has no idea that he's an agent.
All that means they have no idea about the baggage that comes with being an agent. He can explain the scrapes and occasional broken bone on his skateboarding hobby (which isn't exactly a lie, he did have to infiltrate a skateboarding competition as a contestant, and he somehow got third place), but it's much harder to explain away the PTSD.
Thankfully, he's able to keep that part mostly under wraps. It's stressful, and probably not healthy, but it's better than having to leave his family for good.
Once the kids are old enough to be able to protect themselves, and he's been mostly taken off field work (being an agent is notoriously hard on a person, if one manages to live that long), he'll tell them.
But he doesn't want them to know yet. If they know, they won't keep quiet, things will slip, and they'll become targets.
And he doesn't want them to see how he's barely holding it together most days, barely keeping control over everything that threatens to overwhelm him.
They think of him as cool, casual Uncle Perry. They shouldn't have to carry the knowledge that he's the exact opposite of their assumptions. Sleeping in not because he's lazy or a heavy sleeper, but because nightmares and horrible intrusive thoughts keep him up until the first rays of dawn crack through the curtains. Bruised and broken because of missions gone wrong, not misjudged skateboard tricks. Startling easy due to years of having to constantly be hyper-aware of everything.
They don't need to know that, so they won't.
What are the boys even up to today? Perry gets up and walks over to the balcony to see if he can spot them.
It turns out they're having a massive, city-wide bumper car battle. Perry quickly ducks to avoid being spotted.
Well, as long as he stays in the lab, it'll be fine.
Speaking of staying in the lab, he needs to finish building the dimensional -inator to get Heinz home. He can't afford to take breaks.
Sure, he's got almost two hours left until the dimensions are closed forever, but it'll take every minute for him to figure out how to do any of this.
Even just the basic electrical work is confusing, and that's what he does whenever he helps Phineas and Ferb build. He's used to weird power requirements and strange circuitry, but this really takes the cake.
But it'll be worth it to finish this and get Heinz home. It'll be worth every single twinge in his back and word he has to look up. It'll be worth everything to get him back.
He hasn't even attempted to process the last three minutes from the last dimension. Heinz had convinced him (although not thoroughly) that he was going to go home- and then he kissed him and shoved him into the portal.
Talk about a bait-and-switch. Not to mention, Heinz completely missed the ball when Perry literally asked him out, then kissed him but a few hours later.
And the cherry on top? Heinz had said "I love you" right before he pushed Perry through the portal.
Oblivious isn't a strong enough word to describe how absolutely clueless Heinz can be sometimes.
He just has to hope that once he's done with this, they'll fix up this misunderstanding.
And maybe he can get at least a day of vacation. Even just to fill out the mountains of paperwork involved with a mission of this caliber.
Being a secret agent is good work, and it pays decently well, but good lord is there a lot of paperwork. He doesn't have to lie to the kids when he says he's frequently swamped.
The only difference, really, is that the kids think he deals with suppliers for government buildings. (Hey, someone has to do it, and it's boring enough for the kids to take almost no interest in his work.)
This whole adventure has been exhausting. Once all this is over, he's going to go home and sleep . Nevermind the fact that it'll only be three PM at the latest. He's going to go home, and he's going to straight-up collapse.
Actually, he'll probably take a shower first, but after that? He's going to enjoy a nice nap. It's been a long time since he's had an uninterrupted nap, and god knows he needs one.
His eyes are slowly blurring over, and he blinks to clear them. They don't clear, so he scrubs at them. When they stay obstinately blurry, he groans and turns to the -inator. He can get a start on building everything, at least. Then maybe his eyes can adjust, and he can stave off the impending headache.
This happens sometimes, his eyes will blur over when he's reading too much tiny writing, especially if he's trying to decipher bad handwriting like Heinz's. If he doesn't take a break, then he'll end up with a wicked headache.
He sighs. Heinz's blueprints might be more intuitive, but at least Ferb's handwriting is neat. He definitely inherited it from Lawrence. If Perry thought his handwriting was neat…
Although his neat writing is more out of necessity than anything. Danville is a pretty progressive place, but even then, ASL isn't common knowledge.
That's part of why he stayed with Professor Pearlescent for so long. Despite all her other many shortcomings, at least she knew ASL.
Perry sighs. Less thinking about language, more building.
He almost welds the wrong panels together, pinches his fingers multiple times, and somehow manages to build most of the outer shell and user interface by the time his eyes are back to normal.
Now it's just time to move onto the wiring, the guts, and all of the hard parts. Starting with the electrical work, once he figures out how to get this last panel onto the -inator.
At least most of that stuff is laid out in its entirety in the blueprints.
Perry looks at the blueprint, then at the bolt in his hand, then the -inator, then back at the blueprint. This bolt should fit into the hole on the side right there, but it isn't. Something's got to be wrong, because it just isn't working.
He does his best to slam the bolt into the side of the -inator, but it only makes his hand hurt.
Great. Now his hand and his head hurt.
Heinz's voice has been practically echoing in his head, telling him to just take a break already for the past half hour. Perry's been stalwartly ignoring it in favor of working on the -inator, but right about now a break sounds pretty good.
He shakes his head. If he wants to get Heinz back, he has to keep working. He'll take a break when he's done.
Then a little snippet of their conversation from last night comes back to him.
"Promise you won't be reckless," Heinz had said, "promise you'll take care of yourself."
Perry hadn't exactly promised to do either of those things, but he had promised to try. And what he's doing right now is probably the opposite of trying to take care of himself.
Maybe he'll take a little break. He can work on the electrical stuff instead of trying to finish the panel. That way he won't technically be lying, but he'll still be working, and he'll still be in control.
Unfortunately, it's the same story with every other part of the -inator. Everything fits together smoothly, right up until the moment it doesn't. Perry looks back at the blueprints again, scouring them to try and find where he went wrong. He can barely even read some of Heinz's tiny scribbles, so he gets up to find some sort of magnifying glass.
His vision almost blacks out when he stands up, and he has to throw his arms out for balance. He can feel his heartbeat pounding inside his skull.
That's probably not good. He leans against the lab table next to him for a moment to wait for things to subside.
Yeah, maybe he does need a break. Or at least some sort of painkiller. Did he remember to replace the pills in his hat after that one mission to Hong Kong?
Apparently not.
Perry sighs and descends the stairs from the lab into the apartment. Heinz probably has some sort of painkillers in his bathroom, he gets exploded enough to need them.
And he does, in the medicine cabinet behind the mirror. Perry takes one and swallows it dry (he's used to it), then closes the cabinet.
It's a little vain, but Perry fixes his hair in the mirror before he leaves the bathroom. At least there's one thing he's in control of. Even if everything else has spiraled beyond belief, he can have one little thing to keep himself in control.
Everybody believes that Perry's a naturally neat and tidy person, but the reality is, it's just something to stay in control. He might not be able to control which missions he's put on, but he can keep his hat tidy. There's no way for him to stop the nightmares and flashbacks, but at least he can keep his outward appearance neat.
And it's a better coping mechanism than pulling out the lighter in his hat and adding one more little round mark to the older rows on his arms.
He hasn't relapsed since he was seventeen, and he plans to keep it that way. Sure, he's come close dozens of times, because that sort of thing never really leaves, but it's been years and years and he's not going to ruin that now.
No matter how out-of-control everything is, no matter how much everything has gone wrong, no matter how much everything hurts, he made a promise. And Perry the Platypus keeps his goddamn promises.
Speaking of promises, he promised Heinz that he'd take care of himself, and he did. Now he can go keep building.
Actually, he should probably get a glass of water or something first. Dehydration headaches aren't fun.
The fridge in the kitchen is absolutely covered in papers and pictures. As Perry drinks a glass of water, he looks over the papers in front of him.
Most of them are old tests of Vanessa's, or pictures she's drawn. A few magnets barely manage to keep everything held to the fridge.
Looking around the kitchen, Perry can see how the coffee maker's paint is chipped, how the old stove is rusting just a bit.
But the cookbooks in the cupboard are organized by color, even if a few spines are warped. The dishes are all sparkling clean, even if none of them quite match each other.
Everything's held together with meticulous organization, even here. He and Heinz are more alike than he previously thought.
He actually really relates to Heinz wanting to take over the Tri-State Area. It's a goal that helps him move past the things that happened to him when he was younger, and he gets to control exactly what he does.
Even though most of his inventions end up failures, it's still nice for him to be able to have some control over the things in his life.
Perry's just here to make sure Heinz doesn't end up overpowering the entire Tri-State Area (which he could actually probably do, if he wanted to).
They're really more alike than Perry ever thought they were.
Years ago, if anybody had told him that he'd end up relating more to his nemesis this much, if anybody had told him that he'd be trying to save his nemesis from a different dimension, he'd have laughed it off.
But here he is, relating to his nemesis and fighting to get him back.
He'd better get back to building. Maybe now that he's got fresh eyes and a little bit less of a headache, he can figure out what was going wrong.
The stairs to the lab are slightly worn in the middle. Perry wonders if this lab used to be another evil scientist's before Heinz moved in.
It might have been. This building certainly has history.
When Perry sits back in front of the -inator, looking over the blueprints again, he realizes the issues he's been having all along are easily fixable. Nothing is fitting right because he forgot to convert the units.
To be fair, it isn't really his fault. Most of the measurements are listed in metric units, so he assumed they all were. But there are a few that are in imperial, for some reason, and he completely ignored all the unit signs.
Still, that explains a lot.
Thankfully, it won't take much to fix everything. Just a few calculations and re-cuts. He won't even have to rebuild anything from scratch.
Which is a good thing, considering that he only has half an hour left.
Still, what a difference a break can make. It turns out, if he doesn't work himself into the ground, he can work much better.
He sighs. Although it's true, talk about an anvil of an Aesop. Forced fable much?
Eh, every good story needs a moral. A lesson, a theme. Candace is always complaining about her English teachers making them do theme and moral things every year, but every good story has one.
And if this were a work of fiction, "take breaks and you work better" would probably be it.
That, or something like "don't let your nemesis pull other people out of other dimensions".
Before he even realizes it, the -inator is almost done.
He takes a deep breath. This is it. The final reckoning. If this works, Heinz will pop back up in the lab, unharmed.
If it doesn't, he won't appear. Or he'll show up dead. Or on fire. (Or maybe dead and on fire.)
Perry doesn't quite know which of those outcomes is worse, so he's going to hope that everything ends alright.
There's only two minutes left. There won't be any time for a redo.
Carefully, he sets the dials to "one life-form" and the last dimension they were in.
All he needs now is a bit of DNA. (Perry considers it rather strange that the DNA thing ended up pulling four cis versions of him out of other dimensions, but that's dimensional science, he supposes. The science does seem rather dubious.)
He can just go and grab Heinz's toothbrush. That'll work.
One minute and thirty seconds left. He races back down to Heinz's bathroom and grabs his toothbrush.
One minute. He shoves the toothbrush into the DNA chute and triple checks the settings.
Thirty seconds. He plugs the -inator into the wall and rushes back to the -inator.
With seventeen seconds left to go, Perry pulls the switch.
The lab floods with green light, and he covers his eyes.
Please work. Please, please, please.