Forever Forever Forever Summer
Chapter 9: Rockpart Street
Today’s the day.
A few hours prior, Ferb, Isabella, Buford, Gretchen, Adyson and Katie had taken a bus to Badgertown under the guise of spending an evening with friends to take their minds off of the person they're missing. In reality, their plan was the exact opposite.
They lingered in the nearby park to pass the time, watching people stroll by just living their lives, carefree and unaware. The dreaded calm before the storm. Today could have been like any other perfect day if not for those... those...
He finds himself lost for words. Strange. There were plenty of potential words for the people that kidnapped Phineas - monsters, creeps, any number of profanities - but none of them were enough. None of them were enough for the rage and devastation he was enduring. He had always believed actions speak louder than words and he was ready to prove it tonight.
Isabella, meanwhile, paced back and forth for so long and so intensely that a concerned stranger asked if she was doing okay. She quickly apologised and said she just had a lot on her mind, which, to her credit, wasn’t technically a lie.
Ferb, meanwhile, sat on a bench at the outskirts of the park, endlessly tapping his foot on the loose dirt below him. In the hours before Phineas’ rescue, Ferb was feeling his absence stronger than ever. He was a spring under tension, as if any strong enough disturbance would cause him to either break or lash out. Countless indistinct emotions swirled just out of reach. It was unlike him. He wasn't himself without Phineas.
As the fury rises uncomfortably high, he takes a deep breath in,
and,
out.
This anger wasn't going to waste. Not tonight.
~
The late evening chill accompanied them as they set up their base camp under the protection of the merciful night. They nestled themselves between a patch of flourishing trees and bushes, out of view from the building’s upper floors and out of range of their external cameras.
Ferb's heart was pounding in his ears. Flurries of emotions washed through him. No time to get distracted. After being torn away from him for far too long, his brother was only a few walls away. Nothing would stop him now.
“Testing.” Isabella murmurs into her earpiece as Gretchen finishes setting up the modem. “Irving, Baljeet, can you hear me?”
“Loud and clear! Base is up and running, we’re ready when you are, ma’am.” Irving responds, a little fuzzy but audible.
“Good. How's the signal, Gretch?”
“All green. Should be stable.”
“Perfect. Do we all remember the plan?”
An array of yeps and uh huhs fill the comms and mini-camp from everyone except one.
“Ferb.” Her eyes meet his and it feels like having a conversation without saying a single word. “Are we ready to go?” Every hope and fear, every piece of dread and love... no matter what happened, they were in this together for Phineas.
Ferb gives a thumbs up and pulls the hefty grapple gun from a duffle bag. Taking a few steps to get a clearer shot at the building, he kneels, throws the bazooka-sized thing over his shoulder and readies his aim.
“Base, we’re ready to fire at your signal whenever the coast is clear.”
“Roger that. Standby.”
A deathly silence overcomes the dry evening air. Starlight sparkled above their heads while they sit in wait.
“Fire.”
Ferb pulls the trigger, and with a heavy fwoomf a shock wave travels through his body and into the ground. The grapple glides through the air and latches onto the wall just above their chosen second storey window. Letting muscle memory take care of the rest, he anchors his end of the line to the ground and gives another thumbs up.
“No going back now. Keep us posted, girls. And Buford.”
It was designed as a reverse zipline, making the verticality of a two-storey window much more manageable than actually climbing the rope or scaling the wall. Plus, being a zipline, it would make getting Phineas out a lot easier too if he wasn't mobile.
With a bit of lockpicking magic, Isabella pulls the window open and masterfully squeezes inside. Her eyes never stayed in one place but were laser focused on everything she saw. As Ferb followed, she whispered into her earpiece.
“Status?”
“You are clear to proceed, but do not let your guard down.” Baljeet reports, audibly tapping away at his keyboard.
“Roger.”
Ferb closes the window without a sound and they continue forward.
There are no footsteps. The pair stay side by side up against the inner walls, slinking through bizarrely labyrinthine corridors closer and closer to their target. Ferb let Isabella to lead the way, she had far more navigation experience, but the floorplan was burned into his memory anyway. You could never be too prepared.
As they delve deeper they leave the outer windows behind, the distant warmth of streetlights fully replaced with overhead fluorescents humming. It was clinical, cold and lifeless. Ferb could easily have believed it was abandoned if it wasn't so clean.
They approach a fork in the path - the corridor continuing forward and a sharp turn to the right. Without thinking Ferb knew which way they needed to go, but before they could make it to the turn, Irving yelps in their ears.
“Stop!” They instantly pause as if they’d been doing training drills for months. “Someone's up there, stay put.”
And so they did. Statue still, breath bated. So far, so good. They’d been lucky so far to not run into anyone.
“Wait...” Irving mutters. It wasn't an instruction. “Wait, something’s-”
In a flash, the white halls are bathed in red as alarms begin to scream all around them. The fluorescent lights are replaced with rotating beacons descending from the ceiling, the shadows dance and taunt from their walls and all other colour vanishes from the surroundings.
Isabella flinches while, outwardly, Ferb remains still. In his chest the terror had quickly clawed its way back inside. His hand attempts to grip something on the wall but it only glides across the polished tile.
“Irving...!?” Isabella whisper-shouts, just barely loud enough for Ferb to hear over the alarms.
“I-I don't know!” Irving stammers. “Everything was normal, but then Phineas-”
Ferb bolts, leaving Isabella behind at the corner. Damn the person in the corridor, damn his own safety. No more waiting. No time to lose.
“Ferb!” Isabella shouts after him, far too late to make any difference to the guard spotting him.
“Hey! You're not supposed to be-” They're interrupted by their own choked groan as Ferb punches them to the ground. He was willing, ready, even, to continue fighting, but there was no time. He stumbles for a few steps as he refinds his balance and continues his sprint. His hands were numb, he couldn't feel his fingers. If he broke a bone, if the red light was hiding blood on his knuckles, right now it didn't matter. Nothing else mattered.
“Intruders on the second floor! I repeat, intruders on the second floor!” Still toppled over and unsteady, the guard manages to pull out a walkie-talkie and holler. As Isabella runs past, she smashes it with her heel.
“What’s going on?” Gretchen asks, no doubt seeing the alarms going off from the ground. “Do you need backup?”
“Stay where you are, girls! Things just got hairy! Irving, Baljeet, is Phineas okay?”
“He has seemingly released himself on his own, I did not know that was a possibility!”
“But is he okay!?”
They continue talking but it blends into the background noise as Ferb's focus concentrates even more tightly. He storms through a red and black tunnel and knowing exactly where the light at the end was. Anything in his path was knocked down without a second thought.
When the map he seared into his memory finally brings him to his destination he misses no steps and rams his body into the door. It snaps off its hinges, causing it and Ferb to collapse to the ground like a felled tree. Shots of pain make it through the numbness as he lands on the splintered wood but he forces them back into hiding as he tries to pull himself up onto his feet.
Footsteps approach from behind, and he gathers from the fact their owner doesn't immediately knock him back to the ground that they're Isabella's. He expects a hand to help him up, but instead she stands beside him, looking forward at something he can't yet see.
“Oh my god...” Her voice trembles, almost inaudible under the alarms. “PHINEAS!”
Ferb stands, looks and freezes.
The room was split in two; one half a dark control room, full of monitors bleeding error messages and walls of tech Ferb didn't care to try and understand, and the other a tiled cell imprisoning Phineas, the halves connected by a wall-long window and a single door.
He was finally here. After all this time, the only thing between the brothers was one piece of glass.
Phineas, oh, god, Phineas, was backed into the far wall, teeth bared, on his hands and knees, blocked in by two guards, one of which had turned to see what the crash was. This was the kind of fury Ferb knew took hell on earth to get from a boy as infinitely cheerful as him. If he got his hands on them...
There were stains on the wall but the red light made it impossible to tell what made them. The few pieces furniture in that half of the room were a mess, everything either toppled or damaged. He couldn't see the headset but some of the wires connecting it to the wall had been crudely severed and were now periodically sparking.
Phineas’ gaze shifts. Their eyes meet. His face lights up, briefly free from whatever living nightmare he had been trapped inside. Ferb feels the first drop of relief in weeks. They speak without words.
“Back off, kids! This is none of your business!” One of the guards shouts as they approach the window.
“Door’s locked, gimme a sec!” Isabella shouts, ignoring the demands. As she pulls out her lockpicks and kneels to be level with the lock, Ferb gets a much more direct idea.
Not taking his eyes off of Phineas, not even blinking, Ferb grips the edges of one of the abandoned office chairs, spins for momentum and hurls it through the window, instantly reducing the glass to glitter. The chair crashes into the first guard, sending the both of them tumbling in such a way that it hits the legs of the second and trips them over too. They lay in a pathetic heap next to Phineas, groaning and squirming in pain.
“Oh!” Isabella exclaims. “That’ll do it!”
Ferb clambers over the consoles and monitors, making no effort to watch where he steps. The broken glass crackles like a raging flame underneath his feet as he passes through the window frame.
Phineas’ arms rise and reach out weakly, trembling like a newborn animal. Now Ferb was here and could truly see Phineas unobscured by camera grain, he could see he looked so fragile. As if he was nothing more than paper. Even in his furor he knew this wasn't from his brotherly instinct warping his perception.
All the same, Ferb drops to his knees, wraps his arms around Phineas and pulls him as close as physics allows. His heart still beats. He still breathes. He’s still here. He couldn't be more alive.
Phineas whimpers and returns the embrace, almost imperceptibly tugging on the back of Ferb's jacket. If they had their way the two of them would probably never let go, consequences be damned.
“Hey, I really don't want to interrupt the reunion but we need to get moving!” Isabella calls from the other half of the room, prompted by the guards stirring under the chair.
Just as coordinated as the last day they’d seen each other, Ferb lifts Phineas off the ground and slings him over his shoulders. Knowing how to safely carry someone in an emergency was the type of skill they’d practised but never wanted to need to use, let alone on each other. At least already knowing what to do meant it was one less thing to worry about.
Ferb looks at Isabella, nods, and the two of them begin the home stretch back out the way they came.
“We’ve got Phineas, we’re on our w-”
“They cut the grapple line!” Adyson yelps with the faint sound of Buford spewing a colourful variety of insults and profanities behind her. “They know we’re here!”
“Shit...!” A single swear makes it past Isabella’s filter. “Fall back, don’t risk firing another. We’ll find another way out.”
“Isa, your tenacity is inspiring but almost everyone in the building is looking for you, and if they have access to their own security cameras you will only last so long, it would take a miracle to make it out undetected without aid! Need I remind you that you are on the second floor?”
“I know, we know! Just hang on, we’ve got Phineas and Ferb now, nothing has ever stopped them before. We’re not starting now.”
They turn a corner, finding the way blocked by a wall of identity-less guards. Trying to turn back only reveals more of the hunters flooding into the corridor. Nowhere to turn, nowhere to hide.
Isabella glances at Ferb as she ends up back to back with him.
They’re surrounded.
“Just let us storm in, we can take ‘em!”
“No, stay put, Buford! This is not the time to be reckless!”
“Stand down, everyone.” The alarms stop. The red light fades back to white. One of the human walls parts and a single set of footsteps approaches them, revealing a lone figure, their face obscured by sunglasses and a scarf. A tremor runs through Phineas. “You’re not going anywhere with him.”