#this is messy and unpolished but it was stress writing on election day

[pnfc]

here is some train-of-thought writing that came out today while i was thinking about labels/identity for d&p, sexuality and gender.

18+ for (brief) sex scenes, you’ve been warned, door is over there etc

When Perry laid out the realities of his private life to the Flynn-Fletcher family it was not, in his preplanning mind, a gay coming-out. That was like the 9th or 10th layer of the curtain he was pulling away in the grand reveal, a flimsy one attendant in its connection to Heinz Doofenshmirtz and all the messiness he embodied, mortal threats on Perry and tristate domination schemes and more than one cringeworthy viral video.

So it’s sweet and befuddling to Perry when Phineas and Ferb gift him a handknitted rainbow pride scarf for his birthday that year, maybe the last people he’d expect to take that particular tack.

“Phineas is really taking to Home Ec,” Ferb tells Perry as they refill at the coffee table. “I don’t mean to devalue our shared gift in your eyes, but he made that in just half a period, it was his first project. And I think,” Ferb continues in his low voice, as he retrieves the creamer for Perry. “He might be just a little excited to have a gay family member.”

That’s what Perry is, now that he and his connection with Heinz are out for the world to see. He’d never thought of it in those terms before, nor had Heinz used the word to describe their still-new romantic partnership. Perry’s gay and his former nemesis turned agent-partner is now his boyfriend, is the buzz at the office.

Perry thought it might have a welcome insulating effect, word spreading that Agent P isn’t into women, on an official basis this time. But it didn’t stop Agent Lyla from flirting at him, in fact seemed to goad her on, like Perry’s stony indifference to her was funny, fun to poke at. And it didn’t stop women from cooing over him in public, even with the enamel flag pin from Stacy pinned to his hat band -- again, that may have only exacerbated the situation.

But it did spare him from at least one Monogram holiday present, a profoundly haunting OWCA calendar starring female models in states of Christmassy undress, posed with plush animals. He’d yanked it back out of Perry’s hands, with what might have been bashfulness, and muttered “Gotta get a male model calendar for next year, too, so HR doesnt get on my keister. Carl! You’re in charge of the gay one.”

Perry accepted the designation of gay man, even if he didn’t feel it in his bones. It fit on him like a well tailored suit, the rainbow aesthetic was appealing, queer human history was deeply compelling and Stacy et al were so excited to share in his education on the subject, to share a place with him behind the marching banner. It affirmed Perry’s lifelong indifference to the human and non-human women he was assumed to feel attraction for. But it all felt a bit specious, since Perry harbored attraction for one person only. He couldn’t in a century feel for anyone else the way he does Heinz.

Still here he is, a man with a boyfriend, and if the fact that he’s a platypus threatens that definition, that opinion is not possessed by the people in his life who matter. So he’s gay.

Heinz shares Perry’s ambivalence around labeling, but out of a long legacy of experience that Perry lacks, so he’s a refuge in this. “Bisexual, yeah, that was the rage back in college,” he waxes nostalgic to Perry, during their nighttime couch convos. “The only way to be, unless you were a college republican finance major. But there’s pansexual now too, right? And so many flags -- Vanessa’s friends were over here trying to explain it to me. That girl Laci had so many flags on her bag, it was like the Olympics back there. Or like the last 50 years of Drusselstein regional flags from the warring states -- except like, in more colors than just grey and brown. Drusselstein had a serious dye shortage. They finally cut a deal with the Ukraine in 2006 for green, it was a real gamechanger, but it only complicated the flag design wars.”

“…Anyway it was fun to be bi, in the 80s,” Heinz says. He’s sprawled along the couch, Perry sitting against his bare bent leg, idly rubbing a paw around his knee. “Guys really put themselves together back then, they were electric. And if you slapped on enough liner and eyeshadow to partly obscure your weird shaped face maybe one of them would give you his number, if he had enough cocktails. And sometimes that number would even be legit.”

Pausing, Heinz looking up at the lofty ceiling, his head on the armrest. “I don’t know if I am bi anymore, Perry the Platypus,” he says with a note of regret. “Everyone’s just so sad now, so Linkedin and Panera Bread, even the evil scientists of the day are so sexless -- I dunno, maybe I’ve aged out of the crowd. Once I hit 30 it just seemed easier sticking with women. They can be a lot kinder, in my experience. Or at least more liable to pity a guy like me. Plus they’re, y’know, really hot -- trust me on that one, Perry the Platypus. So I dunno if I’ve got the right to be all ‘loud and proud’ just because I knew how to party in my 20s. …At least, I didn’t have the right for a good decade there.” Perry’s smirking across at him, elbow propped on the bend of Heinz’s knee. “You don’t need to give me that look,” Heinz scolds. “I know what you are to me. You don’t need to rub it in. “But, you know what I mean: you outgrow the bi phase, you get married, you work with a lot of cute dancers, accept an arduous future of heterosexual post-divorce dating efforts -- and then you, ah -- meet a very attractive platypus,” he says, struggling because Perry is pressing his hands into Heinz’s thigh, trailing a leisurely path upwards. “And it, uh. Gets confusing. …Oh my god, Perry.” His splayed leg shakes and he props it up on the back of the couch as Perry focuses on worsening the situation in his cotton workout shorts. He told Perry not to rub it in -- that’s always annoying, being told what not to do, what not to rub.

Despite all of Heinz’s wordy equivocating he is loud about Perry’s role in his life, the first to introduce Perry as his boyfriend or himself as Perry’s, though he tends to prefer the word partner, maybe for its alliterative quality. “Yes, Perry the Platypus is my partner,” is the line trod out to whichever party guest, since more often than not Perry is the one who needs no introduction. “And I mean romantic partner, just to be clear, so there’s no confusion. Because we used to be work partners too, and we still are. But we’re an item.” And if Heinz deems the partygoer in question to be sufficiently magnetic and therefore threatening he will follow this up with the even more unnecessary “So don’t even think about it.” Perry should find this more mortifying than he does, probably, except that it’s cut short conversations with a lot of people who turned out not to be worth Perry’s time. Quite efficient, letting your boyfriend trim the homophobic tallow off your social sphere with his blunt-sheared social crudity. More than one social blowout has turned into a furious makeout session back behind the venue, Perry dragging Heinz’s back down a brick wall so he can suck his tongue, so Heinz’s pleas of “Perry we’re parked right over there” muffle into whimpers under a canopy of evening cicada call.

Perry came up in OWCA right when they were transforming their internal messaging, making it superficially friendlier. Some changes were Carl’s well-meaning suggestions that became enshrined. “The agents shouldn’t be shamed out of exploring their natural desires,” was the gist of his plea to Monogram -- Perry retains a fuzzy memory of the scene, he couldn’t have been older than 3 then, was delivering a hot beverage to Monogram’s office as part of his daily duties. “Even the ones who aren’t, um… intact, they still feel things.”

“So we tell them not to. Anything less is insanity. It’s sick, Carl.” He took the heavy coffee from Perry’s hands. Perry’s palms were wet and burning. “The animals need to focus on one thing, and that’s the mission. Lord knows I don’t need to hear about whatever nasty business they get up to back at the zoo, in their off-hours. But we’re dealing with dumb, wild animals, Carl. We need to stamp out all that mating distraction with a vengeance. This is a war, Carl, against evil itself, and they’re humanity's front line.”

But Carl must’ve gotten something through, because the recruits younger than Perry endured less scare mongering around sex, fewer militaristic tirades from Monogram about the primacy of the fight and the evils of carnal temptation. Mono’s coffee mug featured a hula dancer whose bikini vanished at high temperatures -- it had always been difficult to take him seriously.

And one day they’d all been gifted a Carl-designed asexual pride tee, the OWCA logo in purple and grey, and a “Be who you are!” platitude written in Carl’s loopy cursive. This messaging was muddled to say the least. This was a human designation, asexuality, of which Perry had only partial comprehension -- and Carl seemed to be prescribing it to the agents even as his words encouraged free identity. But the design was nice, Carl had a flair for that -- the flag colors were classy and austere, not quite to Perry’s taste where t-shirts were concerned, but definitely suited to Heinz. Except Perry knew even back then that if any human pride flag fit Heinz, this was not it.

He still has that shirt bunched in the bottom of a drawer with the other old employee tees, including one with Carl’s face and chocolate stains on it. Maybe that human designation does fit Perry, in a certain technical sense. In the fall and winter. Seasons when he sits with Heinz watching trashy old 70s flicks that burgeon and bulge with more nudity than the plot demands. “You see how they filmed skin back then, Perry the Platypus?” Heinz will lament. “It’s crazy, her legs are like glowing -- people don’t look like this anymore.” He works himself up trying to explain the magic effect to Perry, while Perry just leans into his side and gazes up at him. Human attraction is cute, defanged like this, watching Heinz helpless in the thrall of some chainsmoking director’s bad movie about a city cop taking down apocalyptic gangs. And just to be mean Perry won’t touch Heinz’s hard-on -- but he’ll touch everywhere else, as the movie plays, nose his bill up the side of his shirt and kiss his hot skin, and he’ll watch Heinz shudder his way to breaking point, whereat he digs himself out of his pants and pulls himself off in a few fast strokes. Perry doesn’t need to get off to enjoy this. It satisfies just like the old thwartings. Perry’s just hitting other self-destruct buttons, on Heinz’s body -- he’s really one big button, if Perry’s honest, and Perry savors pushing it again, and again, and again.

So he could take or leave the labels. He likes that he and Heinz cut a different shape, one that doesn’t slot neatly into a human-made hole. But they mean a lot to the kids, Perry observes, as they grow into high schools and colleges, as they get passionate and motivated, as Vanessa breaks up with Monty and doesn’t look back. And Perry, Perry’s not even a person to so many of the humans he encounters, much less one with an orientation worth caring about. So it’s nice. He carries the cheery rainbow umbrella with the London skyline that Lawrence brought back from across the pond. He wears Ferb and Phineas’s snazzy rainbow scarf, Stacy’s hat pin. It’s not borne deep in Perry’s bones, this identity, but it’s a lovely accent, fortified by the people he loves. No depth required.

Which is why it does not seem too jarring, many years in the future, a decade onward, when his partnership with Heinz looks different. After they’ve danced through years of late night karaoke, hitting up gay bars and the vanishingly rare sapient-animal-friendly club, both of them growing loose and happy in their linkage to each other, holding each other’s hands and feeling the clink-clink of their rings. It was just more playtime for both of them, Heinz bustling around Perry to deck him out in 70s throwback fits with the big cheesewedge collars and migraine stripes, Perry standing tiptoe to zip up Heinz’s dress as he sits craned forward on the floor, holding frizzy wig ringlets out of the way, before Perry smooths his hands out across Heinz’s shoulders and he lets the hair bounce back down.

It’s still play, maybe, until the year that Heinz’s mousy hair is long and shoulder-brushing. Perry lounges in the balcony hammock with one hand trailing on the ground, as he watches Heinz pull it up into a ponytail before tearing into a vintage radio repair, an ongoing collaboration with Lawrence. And something that wasn’t serious now is, because even now, dressed down in oil-stained sweats and a holey tee, with wispy silver hair and no 80s eyeshadow on to obscure her charming face, Perry sees that she’s beautiful.

Perry wants to tell her this, when they’re getting in from an anniversary dinner out. He has the words in his hands, he’s already told her several times, because she needed to hear it those first few staggering attempts to hit the daytime streets in skirts, that she looked right in them, looked cute. Perry says it differently now, as he presses her down into the pillow with a hand, leaning across her skinny torso. Heinz’s natural hair fans the pillow, heat-curled and sprayed for the special night. Perry presses his soft bill to her forehead, trails down to her rouged cheek, further down to her lips, where her plum purple lipstick looks black in the dark. Perry says it with hands down her face, trailing into her soft hair and gripping it tight as she touches him. He says it with clawmarks trailing up her thighs and snapping the net of her tights as he swallows her down, the ritualistic tearing of Heinz’s fabric newly modified into a synthetic cherry pop, and if in the dark beads of blood flower up under his claws Perry licks them too, with love and apology, with a want to get more of Heinz into him. And he says it one more time when she’s asleep and curled around him like the crescent moon, and he reaches in to unhook her earrings, puts them on the nightstand.

Is Perry gay now, when the shape of him and Heinz seems so the same, despite her changes? Well, it’s not the most pressing question. It’s hard enough contemplating how Perry will introduce his girlfriend to his family, when he used to swear up and down the day would never come. But not girlfriend, wife, and not wife, partner -- so he’s circumvented it rather ingeniously, actually, a fact he hopes Phineas and Ferb appreciate. They decide to do it that week, packing the fixed-up radio and a few fresh loaves of zucchini bread, decoratively ribboned, into the truck. Perry helps smooth Heinz’s hair in the driver’s seat, and Heinz smooths her floral skirt down before taking off the brakes. Perry adjusts his hat in the mirror, and judges the scarf around his neck. It still looks cute on him, now flaming more vibrant in hue against the greying fur of his chest. It’s still his boys, hugging around him, all the unrestrained cheesy love they felt for Perry as kids preserved in rainbow yarn. So he wears it, as he and Heinz drive ahead together through the rest of it.