Chapter Text
Rachel Green is getting married today.
It’s not a big deal, Monica keeps telling herself. It’s not a big deal that she’s sitting in the coffee house, listening to Chandler talk about his dumb fucking dreams, whilst her parents are probably taking their seats for the ceremony at the Plaza.
It’s also not a big deal that they were invited when she, Rachel’s childhood best friend, was not. Because hell, even the Plaza could only hold so many people, and their parents go way back. They play golf together at the country club every weekend, and when was the last time Monica had even seen Rachel?
So no, it’s not a big deal.
One person Monica knows is getting married, and another walks in miserable because his ex-wife is moving her stuff out today. It feels very balanced, very New York.
Except he’s whining and saying he wants to be married again, and the door swings open.
Rachel Green walks into the coffee house, and Monica forgets how to breathe.
She’s wound up and rambling and soaking wet, and oh yeah. She’s in a wedding dress that looks like it’s been dragged halfway through the park. Monica doesn’t know what to do.
Calming her down is easier than Monica remembers, and after ten minutes and a cup of coffee she quietly suggests that they go upstairs. Rachel – loud, fiery Rachel – just nods, eyes hollow. Monica rests a hand on the small of her back and leads her upstairs. She’s not thinking too hard about it. It’s not a big deal.
When everyone is filing into the apartment, Chandler’s hand closes around her arm, keeping her back in the hallway.
“So,” he starts, raising an eyebrow. Monica already wants to punch him. “I guess that settles the roommate problem.”
Monica looks back over at the now closed door and imagines Rachel sitting there, sniffling while the mud from her dress transfers onto the couch. Rachel won’t stay, she wants to say. She’s not the sort of person who could stomach living in a walk-up apartment in a crowded, polluted city where every day you have to shove yourself onto the subway to get to your job that underpays you. Rachel needs closet space, and cars, and gardens with pools in them. And, most importantly, Rachel needs a husband who can pay for all that. As long as Monica’s known her, that’s been the plan.
She doesn’t say that, though. Instead she rolls her eyes and says “I guess so,” like even if Rachel was moving in, it wouldn’t be a big deal. Which, again, it’s not.
Chandler’s expression softens, and he shoves his hands into his pockets. “And you’re gonna be okay with that?”
Monica really wants to punch him.
“Of course I am,” she replies, so forceful that she almost believes it.
*
It’s funny, nobody ever tells you when your world’s gonna turn upside down.
Rachel’s life had been perfect. She’d gone to a decent college, gotten some bullshit degree that she didn’t have to put much thought into because it wasn’t like she was ever gonna use it, and she’d found the perfect guy: not wildly attractive but certainly not ugly, came from a good Jewish family in Long Island, just like her, and, of course, he was an orthodontist. Which, when you think about it, is really the most important part.
She hadn’t planned on walking out of her wedding. She definitely hadn’t planned on trudging through the grimy streets of Manhattan to go find Monica Geller.
And yet, not even two hours after she was meant to be saying ‘I do’, she found herself sitting in a purple apartment being stared at by people she barely knew.
Her father had been upset, of course. Who wouldn’t be, after spending $40,000 for her to not even walk down the aisle? He’d said that love didn’t matter but it did, it had to, because otherwise she’d just be the idiot who’d walked out on her dream life.
Or what she’d thought was her dream life, anyway.
But she’s sitting with these guys, and none of them are married and none of them are rich, but they’re happy anyway. And she thinks, just maybe, that she gets it.
Everyone is talking and laughing and joking and she’s lost, she’s so completely lost, and she sticks out like a sore thumb in her filthy dress but it doesn’t feel bad. They look at her with grins on their faces and there’s no judgement there, no expectation. Nobody’s waiting for her to prove that she belongs here because it feels like she already does, and this. This, she could get used to. This she could build a life out of.
Here. With Monica.
*
Rachel goes to bed early, because everyone’s gone out and it’s not like she’s got anything else to do. She changes into the clothes she’d found neatly folded at the end of her bed, and buries herself under the soft covers.
Manhattan is loud, even at night. Rachel doesn’t sleep.
The next morning, she rises to what sounds like two bulls crashing around the kitchen. On closer inspection, though, it turns out to just be those two guys from across the hall. Huh.
"Don't you guys have your own kitchen?"
The Italian one – what was his name again? – shrugs, and sits down. “Yeah, but we’ve not been shopping in a while.” He turns to face the other one. Chandler, she remembers. Ross’ weird old college roommate. The Italian guy looks at him pointedly. “And I want coffee.”
Chandler rolls his eyes, but there’s a fond smile there, and he turns to the counter. “Cuppa joe for Joe, coming up.”
Rachel jumps up, pacing over excitedly. “Can I make it?” she asks, buzzing, relief washing over her that finally she can be of some use. “Oh, please? I’ve never made coffee before, I wanna try!”
How hard could it be, right?
Chandler, much to her surprise, waves her ahead and sits down. He hums as he opens up the paper, occasionally swatting Joey’s hand away from it.
She messes it up, but if the guys notice they don’t say anything, and she dumps enough sugar in her own that it’s almost bearable.
Then Monica’s there and she won’t stop grinning, and it turns out that they all have jobs which makes sense, of course it does, because that’s how regular people afford stuff, and Chandler’s teasing Joey and laughing as he dances out the door, and it hits her. She’s home.
*
Chandler officially comes out near the end of his first semester at college. Not to his parents, because fuck them, but to his friends. Well, friend. Singular. Ross.
Ross is weird. He’s hyper and over-enthusiastic and way more confident than he has a right to be, and for the first couple of weeks of their rooming together Chandler thinks that he might be, well. Like him.
But Ross points out cute girls on campus, stammers when they talk to him, and is generally just your typical nerdy straight guy. Chandler loves him for it. Until he tricks him into a date with a girl from their psych class, and Chandler gets so flustered that he storms out halfway through the movie and goes back to their dorm, spending the next twenty minutes stumbling out an explanation that he’s kinda slightly gay, okay, so stop setting him up with girls.
He braces himself for a freak-out that never comes, because Ross just squeezes his shoulder with a “sure thing, dude,” before he turns back to his homework.
Two days into winter break and Chandler’s had enough of his mother, so he calls Ross and asks if he can come down and spend Hanukkah in Long Island. Ross says sure. His parents try and set him up with Ross’ baby sister and he laughs awkwardly, and he makes dumb jokes, and he keeps doing that until he’s back in Ross’ room and they’ve snuck up a bottle of rum and then Ross presses their lips together and Chandler doesn’t know what to do because it’s his first kiss with a boy, his first kiss ever, so they just laugh it off and never mention it again.
Then they’re back at NYU, and Chandler sometimes (rarely) meets boys to hang out with and sometimes he makes out with them too, but it’s never anything more than that because try as he might he’s still an awkward teenager with too much hair gel and too little game, and guys don’t really go for that, not in New York.
Ross gets a girlfriend, and she’s beautiful and smart and dear god, so loud, but Ross seems happy until one day he doesn’t. He comes home freaked out because she’s told him that she used to be a guy, and he’s saying “but I’m not gay” over and over. Chandler sighs and explains to him that no, he’s not, because he’s dating a girl.
When Ross calms down he climbs onto Chandler, kissing him frantically. They do stuff that Chandler’s only ever done on his own, and Ross laughs awkwardly the whole way through.
“Guess I’m really not gay.” He looks at Chandler, as if the whole thing is somehow funny. “But thanks, dude.”
Chandler rolls his eyes. “Anytime, bro.” He wants to curl up in a ball of shame and disappear for a while. He wants to meet better friends. He doesn’t say anything.
The next day, Ross introduces him to the girlfriend Chandler had convinced him not to break up with, and that’s how he becomes friends with Janice Litman.
Chandler thinks, in another life, he could’ve really loved Janice. She breaks up with Ross a couple weeks later because he’s been staring too much at this blonde girl on the lacrosse team.
Her name is Carol, and Ross has very loud, very frequent sex with her. Chandler buys her coffee, and she asks him about being gay. He doesn’t think anything of it, at the time. Why would he? She’s just some girl that’s screwing his friend.
But then she’s the girl that’s marrying his friend, and he takes Kip as his plus one and tries not to pay attention to everyone staring at them together on the dance floor.
They go home, and they do that thing they do that they don’t talk about, and the next morning Kip tells him he’s going on a date with a girl he met at the wedding. A month later, he’s moving out to get married. Chandler never gets a wedding invite.
Janice drags him out to watch a play, because he’s been moping too much and besides, it’s her cousin’s first starring part and she wants to support him. The theatre is tiny and dirty, the play is terrible.
At the after party, Chandler spills his drink on someone and looks up to see the lead actor, Janice’s cousin. The guy smiles. Chandler does the manly thing, and runs away.
The next day, he answers his door to find the same guy, and he’s gonna kill Janice for giving away his address, but then the guy says “How you doin’?” and Chandler’s a little bit in love with him already.
After a few months of truly awful dating, Joey moves in. It’s perfect.
Chandler runs into the new girl from accounting in the breakroom one day. Her name is Susan and he invites her for drinks with his friends.
A year later, Ross is getting divorced.
He blames Chandler.
Which is fair, because Chandler blames himself, too.
*
It wasn’t meant to go like this, Chandler thinks. There’s a weight sitting at the bottom of his stomach, churning up everything inside and god, he feels like a kid again, torn between two people so wrapped up in spiting each other that they don’t even see the guilt that’s eating him alive, or the pain that they’re causing him.
Looking back, his parents’ divorce, whilst flooding his surroundings with anger and bitterness, was actually quite painless. Neither parent had held any interest or involvement in the others life. They had no mutual friends to fight over, and once his father had fucked off to Vegas, an entirely different state, it became apparent that he wasn’t going to fight for the house or the kid he’d left behind.
His mother shipped him off to boarding school and made a point of travelling whenever he was meant to be on break, and that was that. Simple, unattached.
Now, however, he’s sitting in a coffee shop on his lunch break, watching his best friend’s ex-wife order drinks, and he can’t relax because if a member of the gang were to walk in and see him with her, Ross would never forgive him.
“You look like you killed a kitten,” Carol says, setting Chandler’s drink in front of him.
“Ha,” he says, because he doesn’t really feel like laughing. “Something like that.”
“It’s not –” she starts, looking at him sadly. “He doesn’t own you, you’re allowed to have friends outside of your group.”
Chandler almost bursts out laughing. Or into tears. He’s not quite sure which. “Not if that friend is you. Ross gets us, you get Susan’s friends.”
“That plan was never fair. Besides, as much as I love Susan, her friends can be a little…”
“Intense?” Carol nods. “How is she, by the way?”
“She’s good…” Carol looks away, gazing out the window. “I’m pregnant.”
Chandler almost drops his coffee.
It wasn’t meant to go like this. Ross and Carol were meant to be that sickeningly sweet couple, holding hands and reminiscing about the good old days when they were well into their nineties. Ross should have been sitting next to her right now, beaming with pride while they told Chandler the good news. Chandler was meant to be godfather, and Joey was meant to make Al Pacino jokes.
They’d had it all planned out. As long as he’d known Carol, that had always been the plan. Unspoken, but still there.
He breathes a long sigh. “Have you told him?”
She looks down into her coffee, and that’s all the answer he needs.
Without another word, Chandler leaves the coffee shop and goes to buy a pack of cigarettes.