Set post Season 4 (specifically after Happy Birthday Isabella)
The "question nights" is based on a side blog that I run on tumblr called "Question Night Ammo" where I literally just reblog question lists (you know, the kind where you send the person a number and they answer it). My friends and I like to go through them when we have down time, and I feel like Stacy and Candace would do them during sleepovers.
Forever...forever salty they never did anything with the Stacy plot.
"Okay, okay, I got one," Stacy said, flipping upside down on her bed and letting her hair dangle to the floor as she scrolled through the list on her phone. "What is the last thing you ordered online?"
Candace lowered the magazine she held over her face, resting it on her chest as she squinted at the ceiling. "Uhh…oh! The new Tiny Cowboy record! Dad's gonna let me use it in his player."
Stacy groaned, thunking her phone against her forehead. "Aw, man, I was hoping I could get that, but it sold out before I could even log on to the website. Can I borrow it? Pleeeaasssse?"
Candace snorted, rolling over so that she was on her stomach on the floor and waving her magazine in Stacy's general direction. "Duh. You don't even have to ask."
The two girls were finally having a much-needed sleepover after finals week. Sophomore year wasn't hard, per se, but it was way busier than freshman year, and the chem test they'd taken that day had wiped them both out. It had taken very little pleading to get Candace permission to spend the weekend over at Stacy's, with a promise from her mother that she'd text at least once a day to make sure she wasn't dead.
With Phineas and Ferb spending the weekend with their father at an antique expo, Candace was free from busting, free from homework (finals were at least good for something, in that way), and free from all responsibility aside from laying on Stacy's bedroom floor, reading a bad magazine, and doing a round of questions that Stacy had found on Tumblr somewhere.
("Oh my god you still have Tumblr?")
("Yes, shut up!")
"I think the last thing I ordered was a new bow," Stacy said, skipping around a couple of screens on her phone. She paused, her tongue peeking out, and nodded. "Yup. Pink."
Candace grinned. "Stepping outside your usual color scheme, nice. Next question?"
Stacy hopped back onto the Tumblr page she'd pulled up and scrolled a bit. "Oh, here's a fun one! What's the most common recurring theme you have in your dreams?"
Candace opened her mouth and Stacy sat straight up, pointing a finger at her. "That aren't about Jeremy. That's my caveat."
The glare Stacy was sending her only lasted a moment before she cracked and started giggling, Candace not far behind. Candace sat up as well, crossing her legs under her and playing with the drawstring of her pajama pants. "I'll have to think for a second, in that case. What's yours?"
Stacy flopped back over the edge of the bed, holding her phone against her chest so it didn't slide. "Okay, so I'm stuck in the Addam's family house, right? And I can't leave, but I CAN fly. And everything is in black and white. None of them have any idea I'm there, I'm just…flying. Around their house."
"…why?"
"It's a dream!" Stacy protested, flinging one hand out. Her cheeks were pinking from being upside down for so long. "I don't know what it means!"
Candace snorted, thumbing at the magazine pages. "Okay, well mine is way weirder. My most common one – aside from Jeremy and me getting married, obviously – is that Perry is secretly a super-secret agent. Like in this one I had that was a lot like the Wizard of Oz, he was there in place of Toto. You know, the dog? Except he was also a butt kicking secret agent with a hat and stuff. Oh, and he had a nemesis!"
Candace looked up from her magazine with a grin, expecting Stacy to roll her eyes, only to find her best friend staring at her, wide eyed, phone forgotten in front of her face. "Um. Stace?"
Stacy jolted and the phone slipped, smacking her straight between the eyes before hitting the floor. Stacy yelped and fell off the bed after it, clinging to her nose and hissing through her teeth. Candace scrambled up from her position on the carpet and darted to her friend, kneeling next to the girl and gently guiding her hands from her face.
"Okay, no blood, thank goodness," Candace muttered. "You okay?"
Stacy pinched the bridge of her nose, eyebrows wrinkled together in pain. "Yup. Yup, totally fine."
Candace settled back into a cross legged position, hand hovering over Stacy's back. "You sure? That was a hard smack."
"I'm sure."
Stacy had gone weirdly quiet, and Candace lowered her hand from where it hung in the air, setting it in her lap and trying to wrack her brain for what had happened that would make Stacy react like that. "I mean…that's not that weird a dream, right? It's totally based on the fact that I was reading the Wizard of Oz right before. Except the Perry part, I don't know where that came from," she joked.
Stacy's laugh was oddly strangled. "Yup. Totally out of the blue, very weird."
Candace furrowed her eyebrows. "I mean…yeah. Is…is everything okay, Stace?"
Stacy stood abruptly, wrapping her arms around herself and moving back to her bed, away from Candace. "Yup. Very okay. Okay. Um. Next question, do you shower with the lights on or off?"
"On," Candace said, standing slowly and moving over to join Stacy on the bed, forcing down the sting of rejection when Stacy scooted a little bit away from her. "Who even does that, showers with the lights off?"
"I know right, crazy? Headphones or earbuds?"
"Earbuds," Candace said immediately, but her brain was struggling to keep up with everything that had just happened.
What had just happened? The Wizard of Oz wasn't that weird a thing to dream about, Candace and Stacy had discussed tons of dreams related to movies before. That wasn't it. It was the Perry part, for some reason, Candace was sure of it. There was nothing else about what she had said that would give Stacy any reason to react that way – not that her reacting that way to Perry being a secret agent in her dream made sense, either.
Come to think of it, actually, for the last couple months, any time the monotreme had been mentioned, Stacy got quiet or jittery. She stammered a lot more, closed herself off, went dead silent whenever the usual whereabouts question was asked.
"Candace?"
Candace blinked back to reality, looking across the bed at Stacy, who was watching her carefully. "Huh?"
"Next question? I said, "What's the weirdest memory you have of the last few years?" Bet you can't actually answer that one, you have so many," Stacy chuckled, but Candace could tell her heart wasn't in the laugh.
She paused for a moment, a number of Phineas and Ferb's weirder inventions coming to mind – namely the fly one, ick – before she pulled up a memory from the depths of her brain, one she hadn't thought about for a long time, because the weirder Phineas and Ferb's stuff got, the more mundane this memory became.
Except for right now.
"Actually, it's not about one of Phineas and Ferb's inventions," Candace said truthfully, picking absentmindedly at a loose thread on Stacy's comforter. She peeked up at Stacy through her lashes, wanting to see the reaction as it happened. "Remember when I got stuck going to Grandma and Grandpa Flynn's with them and all their friends?"
Stacy, clearly not knowing where Candace was going with the story, winced. "Did you get poison ivy or something?"
Candace snorted. "I wish. No, I touched some weird moss stuff and it made me hallucinate."
Stacy's brows furrowed. "Can moss even do that?"
"Apparently," she said with a shrug. She pressed her lips together. Something about this memory now, in combination with the dream she'd just brought up, made something in her gut feel uneasy. "But yeah, I hallucinated that Perry was a secret agent then, too. I accidentally blew up an island with us in it. Actually, I think the island sank in real life too."
Sure enough, Stacy's face lost all color the second Candace said her pet's name. Her fingers tightened on her phone, and her lips practically vanished for how hard she was pressing them together. "Oh?"
Candace squinted – something was up. "Yeah. There was this evil pharmacist dude – you know, now that I think about it, he was the same dude as in the Wizard of Oz dream. Except not green. At least my dreams are consistent. And then we got rescued by an eagle in a hat after Perry pulled me out of the exploding cave and why do you look like you're going to be sick?"
Stacy jolted at the abrupt change, looking up at Candace with wide eyes. "W-What?"
Candace leaned back in exasperation, not willing to jump around the topic anymore. "Every time the last few months someone has brought up Perry, you get weird. Did you develop a platypus-phobia or something?"
Stacy threw her hands up instantly. "No! No, I love the little guy, he's awesome! I have nothing against Perry, trust me."
Against her better judgement, Candace did believe her. Her eyes were very sincere as she spoke, if not a little nervous. "Right."
"I do," Stacy said, a little defensively. "He's a great pet and a good friend, there is no reason I wouldn't like him."
Candace wrinkled her nose. "A good friend? You barely even see him."
Stacy's lips twisted in what looked almost like a silent curse. "I mean…t-to Phineas and Ferb, obviously. And you, I'm sure."
Listen, Candace wouldn't call herself a detective by any means. She got too distracted by tiny side quests and she even knew that she failed to see the bigger picture at times. But it felt, suddenly, like a lot of really tiny puzzle pieces were trying really hard to be shoved together into an answer, and her brain was starting to ache.
Why was her most recurring dream (Jeremy aside) of Perry as a secret agent? Why did she have vivid memories of hallucinating him as one, when her grandmother had explicitly told her that she hadn't even touched the moss that made people hallucinate?
Where did he go every day?
Stacy was watching her closely, and the second Candace put her hands to her mouth, eyes widening, she sat back against her headboard with a sigh and buried her head in her hands. "Great," Stacy muttered.
"He is a secret agent."
"The one thing-"
"Oh my god, Perry is a secret agent."
"-I was supposed to actually keep from you for once in my life-"
"Has he been one this WHOLE time?"
"-and you figured it out because of a stupid question blog on Tumblr."
Record scratch.
Wait.
What.
Candace looked up from her internal screaming and stared at her friend. "Hold up. You knew?"
Stacy dropped her hands and blew a raspberry, looking guilty. "Yeah," she mumbled, lowering her gaze and playing with the bracelets on her wrists. "Known for a couple months."
"You-?"
Stacy lurched forward, gripping Candace's wrists tightly and urgently. "You can't tell him you know, Candace. You can't tell anyone, not even your brothers. You'll lose him, you hear me?"
Candace jumped at the sudden shift in tone. Her head hurt like it never had before. "What?" she practically whispered.
Stacy's hands tightened and her eyes darkened. "He'll get taken away from you guys if anyone finds out you know. I kept my memories on a technicality that I'm not a Flynn-Fletcher. But since you…you figured it out from pastmemories, I don't…I don't know if they'll even give you the option to do the memory erasing."
Candace studied her friend for a long moment, softening. "You kept that from us, this whole time…so the boys wouldn't lose Perry?"
Stacy peered up at her through her eyelashes, and something like a smile tugged at the girl's lips. "Or you."
Taking a deep breath, Candace tugged her hands around so that they were holding Stacy's properly. She let the breath out shakily and shook her head. "Right. Okay. So I wasn't hallucinating, my secret agent dreams have all been based in reality, apparently there's enough threat of evil in this city that my pet platypus fights it, and you know…how, exactly?"
Stacy's eyebrows lifted and her tentative smile grew a little wider. "Is that the next question?"
Candace barked out a laugh and squeezed Stacy's hands. "It is now."
It was going to be a very long weekend.
