Work Text:
“Did you say something, Phineas?” Isabella mumbled, her voice thick with sleep and rather unconcerned, having heard what sounded like her name being called somewhere through her dreams.
It wasn't every day that you slept in your best friends' backyard in sleeping bags after a long, joyful, and utterly exhausting day of building a hundred drones capable of projecting a three-hundred-sixty-degree movie across the night sky. Her sleep had been light because of it, and she'd been able to hear someone murmuring right beside her.
“I'm saying… when we move in together, don't kick me at night, alright?” The words came out as a grumble, since Phineas was speaking directly into his pillow. And veeery slowly.
Isabella stared into the void for a good twenty seconds, trying to piece together what her friend had just said.
“Okay,” the girl shrugged, then flopped back onto her pillow and turned onto her side. Yes, she had a persistent habit of throwing her legs over people (and stuffed animals), so Phineas's request hadn't struck her as strange; it probably wasn't very pleasant. Even poor Gretchen had complained that after their girls' sleepover, she'd been left with small bruises on her leg.
“Wait, what?” Isabella shot upright. “Did you say ‘move in together’?”
“…Mm-hmm,” Flynn hummed serenely.
“Is… is this what I think it means? ‘Move in together’ -did you mean ‘live together’?”
“Mm-hmm,” he repeated just the same. “We're going to… mmm, live together anyway,” Phineas continued in the same vein.
“How… how do you figure?” It all sounded like a surreal dream to her. Maybe this really was all just a dream after all…
“What, are we supposed to build a family in separate houses?” Phineas mumbled calmly, somewhere into his own hand.
Isabella's heart began to hammer two hundred times faster. Any trace of sleep vanished as if wiped away by a hand. The girl couldn't believe what she'd just heard, so she pinched her own arm. Her surroundings hadn't changed one bit. The quiet nighttime backyard hadn't evaporated or transformed into her familiar pink bedroom (…as usually happened). And her sleeping best friend still lay right before her eyes.
“What did you say?” The girl dared to ask again, because she still didn't trust her own ears.
The answer came only after about fifteen seconds.
“Well, you know… stars, fate, all of that,” Phineas mumbled drowsily (it could hardly be called a conversation). “We're destined to be together, and you're not getting out of it.” Flynn groaned and rolled from his stomach onto his side, dropping his head somewhere downward. “I'd love to hear your opinion, but either way, we're going to have a wedding around eighteen, two kids a few years later, and a cool house.” The boy even yawned. “Mh, no, house first,” he pulled his hand out from under the blanket and made a gesture as if rearranging words in the air, “then kids. Two. Mm-hmm. We do need a house, don't we? We do. Without a house, there won't be any children. And without your consent, either - it doesn't all depend on me, after all," Phineas nodded, and after a half-hearted gesture, he tucked his hand back under the covers.,”
Throughout his entire monologue, Isabella had slapped herself on the cheeks about three times, trying to convince herself that everything she was hearing wasn't just another one of her dreams. The grass was soft, her face was burning, and the sleep-mumbling Phineas was, after all, real.
“Phineas, what are you…”
“I don't believe in fate…” Phin continued his monologue slowly and languidly, not filtering his words in the slightest. “I don't believe in astrology either. But it all sounds… I don't know, romantic? I'm no good at romance, but… you know, it's as if it's been written into the script of our lives that we're going to end up together no matter what. Mm-hmm,” Phineas nodded and pulled the blanket tighter around himself. “So don't kick my legs, thank you.”
The poor girl's breath caught in her throat. Her hands trembled from the overwhelming flood of emotions, and her voice shook treacherously as she quietly blurted out his name.
“Lie down,” Flynn pulled his hand out from under the blanket and patted his friend's sleeping bag. “You can put your legs on me, just don't kick.”
Isa looked at the boy's hand resting on her pillow and, for a short while, simply stared back and forth between his hand and the boy himself. After the hand patted the pillow again some twenty seconds later, Isabella seemed to “wake up.” She finally lay back down, pulling the blanket all the way up to her ears.
“Okay,” Isa spat out briefly, whether in response to his strange offer to put her legs on him or to the belated request to lie down.
“Fine,” Phineas found Isabella's hand and gave it a couple of squeezes. “Good night,” he said, and then turned completely away from the girl onto his other side.
The girl breathlessly watched all of the boy's slow, languid movements, still struggling to accept reality, and quietly blurted out:
“Good night…”