Looking Deep
Just so you know this is my first fanfic so I am may or may not continue it depending on the reviews but please review honestly. Also this stories title does have a meaning.
Disclaimer: To my deepest regret I don't own Friends.
Summary: My story is set five years after the end of series 10. Chandler was attacked and died, leaving Monica to take care of their four kids. Ross & Rachel got married, Rachel got pregnant and they moved to a bigger place in Boston. Phoebe and Mike now have 2-yr. old twins, a girl called Rain, short for Rainbow, and boy called Cameron, and are also living in Boston, quite close to Ross and Rachel. Joey met and married Andrea and they now live in LA where Joey is working on a big movie and Andrea works in set design and make-up
It had been a year since the attack but the pain and guilt were still there like an animal clinging on to Monica's chest. She felt it most deeply today because it was their anniversary and he should have been there with her. She felt responsible because he had been protecting her and the children from a knife that ended up stabbing him. For hours after he had been pronounced dead she wept her heart out with her family and friends around her, not even able to touch the surface of her grief. A week later there had been the funeral, where yet again she had just stood there weeping, along with her children and friends, as he was buried. To this day she still puts his favourite flower, narcissus, on his grave.
About a month after the funeral her friends helped her move house to Boston to be near her friends at this difficult time. They had had Chandler buried in Forest Hills cemetery on Chandler Street in Boston, it had seemed only fitting. Ah Chandler, the name tasted like sugar and poison to her heart at the same time. Even though it had been so long since she had seen him laying there with a knife in his gut and hardly a drop of blood on him, it still felt like he had been there only yesterday, laughing at his own silly jokes and playing with the kids on the front room floor. Or watching the Superbowl with Joey and Ross and Mike while she Rachel, Phoebe and Andrea had just sat in the kitchen with the children. All except Ben who insisted he wanted to watch it although he drifted back to Auntie Monica after the first ten minutes announcing that he was bored watching people play football. So she had taught him how to knit in a few minutes after convincing him it is not at all girly. Those days were perfect. She still remembered when they had first moved in to that old house, just staring around at the big empty rooms feeling scared and excited at the same time. Now she was working full time, living in a tiny apartment and, worst of all, her children barely remembered their father.
She never went to work on this day or on his birthday. She wouldn't give up on his memory just like that. None of her children understood why she cried so much because they were still too young to understand the concept of death. Erica and Jack were only five, Mia, their miracle daughter was coming up to four and Connor, their own darling son, was just two years old. How could they at so young an age be expected to understand that they would never see their dad again and how much that broke her heart.