50 Words of Phinabella

Summary: A Phineas and Ferb one-shot. Fifty short insights into the relationship between an oblivious child-genius and the Fireside Girl leader mooning over him. Phineas/Isabella, slight Candace/Jeremy.

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Having already finished the Danville Standardized Achievement Exam and checked his answers twice, Phineas sighed, looked at the clock and then towards the girl sitting beside him. He paused, eyes lingering for a moment, then began to absentmindedly doodle on his cover sheet. He had ten different sketches of her finished before the teacher called for pencils down.

"Nothing is gonna stop me from going to this dance, you got that? !" Isabella screamed, shaking the older girl roughly by the collar. Candace's eyes widened as she wondered: what kind of girl got this crazy over a boy?

You would assume that he would always want to stick with Ferb, or he'd assume that she wanted to be leading the other Fireside Girls. Yet whenever he was dividing up the group, Phineas and Isabella always wound up together, for once away from their usual crowd of friends and assistants.

Most of the other girls thought that Ferb was easily the more attractive of the two, with his height and stoicism and deep British accent. So none of them could quite understand why their leader was so desperate for Phineas to notice her (though that was nothing compared to Ginger, for goodness' sake).

Since she had been looking down at him the whole time they had known each other, it was quite a shock when she suddenly realized that he was finally tall enough for them to look eye-to-eye.

Given that he was already at least trilingual by age eleven, Isabella assumed Phineas was just really good at picking up new languages. Still, when she preempted her grandparents' visit with a warning that they didn't speak English very well, she hadn't expected him to go all-out and become fluent in Yiddish over the course of one weekend.

"Do you know how hard it was for me to get this in the first place? !" Irving shrieked, waving the lock of bright red hair that Isabella had been trying to pilfer from his scrapbook. "Get your own!"

It was on a scraped knee, but it still counted.

Phineas was slightly torn—on the one hand, it would probably just take an afternoon for him and Ferb to research enough about orthodontics and dentistry to fix those teeth of hers themselves...but on the other hand, she sort of looked cuter with her new braces on.

"Okay," Candace said, quirking one eyebrow beneath the new Telepathy Helmet her brothers had made, "now I'm getting an image of Phineas flying through the sky as a centaur with rainbows coming out of his butt."

The boys just looked confused while Isabella turned very, very pink.

"Sorry, Candace, but we have to help Isabella," Phineas said, piloting the tiny submarine to latch onto her central nervous system. Ferb, meanwhile, silently noted to himself that this was the first time Phineas had ever directly defied an order from their sister, and that it seemed a fairly extreme alteration to their habits just to recover a measly sash.

"Contrary to what you think, Phineas does notice you. Boys just always take longer with these sorts of things. Now, do you think Jeremy will like this top?"

Isabella was grateful for the massive birthday cake the boys had made her, though blowing out the candles was going to be difficult without the use of a ladder.

Dr. Hirano assured Isabella that there was no need to worry, this was a minor surgery and everything was going to go fine. Phineas and Ferb offered the same reassurances, though they added that if necessary, they were researching Haitian voodoo rituals and had already gotten blueprints that could help them sneak into the morgue.

Whatever their intent, this did not reassure her.

"What a charming young lady," Grandpa Clyde chuckled, giving Phineas a significant look that he, of course, totally failed to understand.

Washing Pinky was usually quite a chore, but Vivian Garcia-Shapiro was still shocked when she opened the bathroom door only to have the little chihuahua rush out past her ankles, dripping water and yipping like mad. And she was even more surprised when she looked into the room and found her daughter and her friend Phineas both fully-clothed in the bathtub, soaked in the soapy water and giggling like crazy people.

Not even Ferb seemed to understand why his brother was so fascinated by Bulgarian folk dancing, but dancing with Phineas was dancing with Phineas, so Isabella was determined to get these moves down no matter how long it took.

It was only one little yelp, yet Phineas had spun around and sprinted to her side in less than five seconds. But as he would later point out, paper cuts could be serious if they got infected or something.

There was something oddly beautiful about an eleven-year-old girl in a pink dress delivering a flying jump-kick to a giant robot's head, at least to the boy currently held in that robot's crushing metal claw.

"I just felt a weird sort of flip-flop in my stomach," Phineas mumbled, holding his abdomen as Isabella crossed the other side of the street, her hair flying behind her and shining in the sunlight. "Do you think those peanut butter sandwiches were bad?"

"Yes, that must be it," Ferb muttered, rolling his eyes without even bothering to look up from his book.

Phineas just stared quietly, wondering why this was taking Isabella so long to spit out when a simple "Happy Valentine's Day!" would have been sufficient.

The fact was, Isabella could have gotten at least a B without any help, but that didn't stop her from spending an entire hour with Phineas on the phone, comparing notes before every test.

Without really realizing it, Candace had grown used to the idea that she could yell at her brothers with little or no chance that they were actually going to retaliate, even to the point of outright insulting them in moments of truly deep anger. What she hadn't counted on was quite how nasty Isabella could be if she tried that in front of her.

Acquisition of the Stealth and Infiltration Patch aside, Isabella thought as she and the other Fireside Girls sneaked along the wall of the dilapidated house, she was not going to let Buford get away with taking Phineas' stuff.

It was as she cheered wildly in the stands of the First Annual Tri-State Area Slug Racing Tournament (held in the Flynn-Fletcher backyard, of course) that Isabella realized: Phineas could make absolutely anything seem fascinating.

"Why do my lips feel so tingly?" Phineas mumbled to himself, right after Dr. Doofenshmirtz's Amnesia-inator had sent an explosive blast through the town and erased Isabella's sudden, startling kiss entirely from his memory.

Adyson rolled her eyes but smirked as she and the other Fireside Girls watched them go. It was just a sprained ankle (at worse) and Isabella's house was just across the street, but if Phineas honestly thought it was necessary to carry her home in his arms like the hero of some cheesy romance novel then she supposed Isabella deserved the chance to enjoy it.

"You're never going to hit puberty, are you?" Ferb asked out of the blue as Isabella left the yard, causing Phineas to frown in utter confusion.

For years before he and Isabella finally started dating, Phineas always thought Mrs. Garcia-Shapiro's "no closing the bedroom door if you have a boy over" rule was just arbitrary and weird.

Phineas could only sigh sadly as the last sunset of the summer faded into twilight, bringing on the final night before the inevitable return to monotony. But somehow, Isabella putting her hand over his on the grass managed to make his heart swell a tiny bit larger.

Though he never really thought of himself as a "leader," Phineas had gotten used to giving directions whenever he was among his peers. So it was a bit weird the first time he wound up in a team where Isabella was in charge, and realized first-hand how good she was at telling people what to do.

"You know, the last time we were here was one of my favorite adventures ever," fourteen-year-old Phineas confided, as for the second time the pair walked down the Champs-Élysées in Paris together.

Ferb had known Phineas for almost a decade longer than Isabella, and he knew his brother better than anyone, hands down. So it was sort of comforting that while she sometimes expressed doubt about Phineas ever returning her affections, Ferb never really questioned that the two would wind up together someday.

Even though Ferb did make an effort to sneak away so that the two of them had time alone together, Phineas was so devoted to his brother that Isabella couldn't help but feel jealous of having to "share" his attention.

"Oops...guess I forgot to tell you about that one," Isabella said sheepishly, after she and the other Fireside Girls had found an amused Phineas hanging upside-down in a net outside their fort.

When Candace showed off her wedding dress to the family, Phineas just smiled and told her that she looked great. When Isabella came out in her bridesmaid's dress, however, he took about ten minutes raving about how absolutely perfect it looked, reviewing each aspect of the outfit with the eye of a fashion critic.

The police chief sighed and rubbed his temples, unsure of what to do. Granted, sixteen different people insisted that they had seen the Flynn-Fletcher brothers pull off this scheme, and the boys didn't deny anything, except to point out that the hot-air balloons were not technically violating any city ordinances. And then he had Miss Garcia-Shapiro insisting the whole thing had been her idea, even as the Flynn boy furiously denied it.

"Okay, heads and I tell Phineas how I feel about him, tails and I don't."

"...Okay, that one was just practice."

"You know, before I met you guys, I probably would have thought something like this was impossible," Isabella mused one day, tapping her face thoughtfully as the boys added more vegetable oil to the plane's engines.

All Phineas knew was that he kept having very nice, happy dreams lately, though he could never quite remember what they were about when he woke up the next morning.

All Ferb knew was that Phineas had spent the last week muttering Isabella's name over and over again in his sleep.

On the very first day she met him Phineas' eyes had widened with a certain strange sparkle of excitement at an idea, and Isabella's infatuation instantly began.

"Let's not worry about 'winning' and 'losing.' The point is we all had fun, right?" All of which, of course, completely ignored the fact that Buford's protests were totally justified—Phineas very well knew that his go-kart had crossed the finish line before Isabella's, if only by a fraction of a second.

Phineas raised an eyebrow, raising an eyebrow at his impassive brother. He wasn't usually the suspicious type, but he couldn't help but wonder why the Fireside Girls were all huddled together right now, talking up a storm. And why were they giggling?

"Wow, that was like the fourth person who thought we were dating," Phineas said. "Weird, huh?" Yet somehow it never seemed to occur to him to stop holding her hand.

"Well, I have determined two things from my infiltration of the Fireside Girls' meeting," Baljeet said, taking off his long wig and removing the lipstick from his face. "First of all, this Sunset book series is not a brainwashing cult, and the girls are in no danger from actual vampires or werewolves."

"Okay, good," Phineas said, rubbing his chin and nodding. "And?"

"Isabella thinks you would look great wearing body glitter."

"Really? Huh..."

"Alright, if we're gonna raise a baby, we're gonna have to be serious about this," Phineas said, pulling out a series of complicated blueprints and charts. "Now, I've been looking into the latest parenting methodologies, and according to the experts Junior here needs lots of stimulation even at this young an age..."

Isabella just raised an eyebrow, looking at the plain chicken egg she was holding and wondering if passing Home Ec really required quite this much effort.

"...Well, he didn't seem very nice," Phineas said sheepishly, rubbing his sore knuckles. The others couldn't help but think that that seemed like a weak explanation for such an uncharacteristic act of violence, especially since the victim hadn't really been doing anything more than flirting with Isabella.

Just as Lawrence was frowning and wondering what had happened to all of his painting supplies, Phineas was stepping back from his work in the backyard with a large grin on his face. "The unicorn looks great! Now all we need is a ten-by-fifteen foot envelope and this'll be the best get-well card Isabella ever got!"

It wasn't the kind of present most girls would have wanted, but Isabella was still honored when, determining this particular specimen was female, Isabellasaurus joined Phineasaurus and Ferbodon in the brothers' list of new paleontological discoveries.

050. Writers' Choice—Pleading

"Please? Pleeeeeaaaaase?"

Isabella stared at the plaintively childish faces before her, one of which belonged to her husband, and felt her natural "Jewish Mother" instincts give way under a barrage of unbridled cuteness.

"...Alright. We can have a Christmas tree this year."

"YAY!" And her entire family ran off, Phineas as cheerful as any of the children.

She paused, reconsidering.

"But it has to be shorter than the roof this time!"

"Ohhh..." they groaned loudly as Isabella gave a slight, amused smile.