A/N: This is the third book in the companion trilogy, Familiar Faces. It is a Roschel modern day AU story set in 2018, and will be about their life. It will feature the main six characters including Mondler and Phike as couples, and probably some new characters too. Assume that Ross and Rachel are played by David Schwimmer and Jennifer Aniston, as this won't be stated throughout the novel to avoid unintentionally breaching any Copyright or Privacy regulations. Will be written simultaneously with the other two stories from the POV of Mondler and Phike respectively, so keep an eye out for those as well as this one.

Please also review this one and the others, as this makes such a difference in terms of holding me accountable for updating and also allows me to interact with you guys and potentially incorporate some of your own ideas.

Chapter 1 – Rachel

"I can't believe that Emma is leaving for college tomorrow and Lara starts high school today," I say to Ross.

I woke up at 4am this morning because I was so nervous and excited. It's so weird that Emma is a sophomore in high school, and Lara will be an 8th grade student. It seems only yesterday that they were young children and not 14 and 16. I woke Ross up because I was feeling so nervous, and absolutely needed to talk to someone who understood.

"Rach," Ross said. "It's not that crazy. They're just a school year older."

"Let me go into parent freak out mode!" I said, indignantly. "It's a huge deal!"

"No," Ross says, firmly. "If I let you freak out, I will, and we're not having that."

I roll over onto my side of the bed, and inch closer towards the bedside table that is beside my pillow. My phone screen lights up as I detach the charging lead from it, and I slide through the notifications on my lock screen. I have a message from Monica and some Instagram and Twitter notifications. I swipe up and enter my password.

The time stamp in the top right hand corner says that it is 6.59am. "Don't we have to wake up the girls?" I ask Ross.

"They don't have to leave until 7.30," Ross says. "But it's probably a good idea."

I contemplate getting up and walking into their bedrooms or texting them because I know that both of them sleep near their phones. I decide that I can't be bothered to get out from under the satin

bed sheets so I go for the texting option. The replies come flooding in surprisingly fast:

mom its too early cba to get up, from Emma

good morning to you too mom, from Lara

I show Ross the replies, and he laughs. "They remind me so much of you," he says.

I push down the duvet, swinging my legs over the bed and standing up. I walk out of the bedroom, down the hallway and then right into the kitchen. I find the cafetiere and select the cappuccino option, after putting my mug underneath the dispenser. I then make Ross one, and walk back to the bedroom to give it to him.

I climb the stairs up to the girl's bedrooms. Lara's door is slightly ajar, so I walk in there first. I can see from the fact that her phone is no longer attached to its charger and that the duvet is very carefully placed to look naturally ruffled, that she wants me to believe that she is asleep.

"Really, Lara?" I ask her. "Is that the best you've got?"

She groans in reply, and I decide to pull the duvet off her bed. She looks up at me with a death stare, and I shrug back.

"Wake Emma up, not me," Lara calls as I walk out of her bedroom to attempt to wake up Emma.

Emma's door is locked shut. She insisted that Ross and I buy her a lock on her door, because she thought that she would need one to get any peace from the rest of us. I know how to pick the lock though, so I use a spare bobby pin that I have in my bathrobe and the door opens. Emma has made more of a convincing effort to look asleep. Her phone is back on charge, and she looks genuinely asleep from the arrangement of her duvet and how she is lying.

"Emma! You may be four years older than your sister, and legally an adult, but I know you well enough to see through even your most convincing attempts to deceive me!" I say, loudly.

She doesn't stir, and so I decide to turn to verbal attempts to wake her up. "I'll text Harvey and tell him that his girlfriend still has to be prompted to wake up in the morning," I say, hoping that I've hit a nerve hard enough to make Emma start to worry.

I can tell that I have got Emma's attention, and less than a second later, she asks, "What's in it for me if I wake up?"

"I'll give you money for you to go get Starbucks at lunch," I say, "so you don't have to eat the crappy food from school."

"Deal," Emma says, and reshuffles herself so I can now see her rather than the duvet covering all of her. I leave her to get ready, and go back to Lara's room.

"Don't come in, Mom!" Lara shouts, as I twist the doorknob. I stop and start walking back down the stairs, because I trust that Lara was getting ready and I don't want to see the behind the scenes of that.

Ross isn't in the bedroom, and so I walk into the kitchen because I know that sometimes he likes to make breakfast. Sure enough, I find him in front of the stove, frying eggs and bacon. There is a loaf of bread beside the toaster.

"Do you want any help with the toast?" I ask him.

"Yeah, Rach," he says, smiling at me. "That would be really helpful. Also, I wasn't sure whether to do them, but do you want me to do fried tomatoes as well?"

I nod, and put the first four slices of white bread into the toaster. I walk over to the cupboards on one side of the kitchen, and find the toast holder. The first round of toast pops up, and I transfer it to the toast holder, and then put four more slices of toast in the toaster.

Lara is the first to come downstairs. She says good morning to Ross and I, and then goes to sit down at the table.

Emma came down a little later after her, just as Ross and I were setting the table with Lara's help. "You almost missed breakfast," I said.

"Oh yeah," Emma said, registering that we were setting up for breakfast. "My hair took ages, sorry."

I rolled my eyes slightly, before realising that since I was exactly like her at her age, and realising that I was being a major hypocrite if I objected so there was no point in making any kind of comment.

We all sat down once the table was fully set out.

"How are you guys feeling about school today?" I ask the girls.

Emma replies first. "I'm only going because I have to," she said. "I'm also a little nervous because apparently in sophomore year, the work gets a little harder."

"In my experience," I say, and Emma starts to roll her eyes. "I know that it may be different now to when I went," I add pointedly, before continuing my point, "it's really not much more difficult than freshman year. It's the next year, when you start the full AP classes that it gets harder."

"Thanks, Mom," Emma reluctantly says.

"What about you, Lara?" I ask, deliberately ignoring looking at Emma whilst I'm still annoyed at her not accepting my advice.

"Not too bad," Lara says. "If anything, I'm glad to almost be leaving middle school, because most people there are so immature."

I nod in agreement. I don't remember my own middle school experience, but I do remember that most of the people were immature bitches, and so I could relate to how Lara felt. I get side tracked by thinking of college, and onto Chandler and Monica and the others who I am friends with.

"Ross?" I said.

"Yes," he answers.

"Have you heard from your sister?" I ask. "I texted her earlier this morning, but she hasn't replied yet."

Ross looked at me. "First of all, when did you text her?"

"When I woke up, at 4am," I reply, sheepishly.

"She wouldn't have been up at that time," Ross says, sensibly. "And even when she did wake up, you're forgetting that she has other priorities like looking after Chandler, and Jack and Erica. I very much doubt texting you back would be one of the first things she would be thinking of doing."

I look at Ross cynically. Sometimes he really does seem to think that I think the entire world revolved around me, and even though we're married, it gets really annoying. "I know," I say, shortly.

Ross turns to talk to Emma and Lara. I stand up from the table, and walk back to the bedroom. My phone is still on my bedside table. I unlock it, and click on the messages app. Monica is the third most recent person in my message inbox, and I type out a message for her. I decide on saying that I hope that we would hang out together at some point, and that I hoped that Jack and Erica would have a good day being freshmen in high school, as Ross helpfully reminded me and that also helped me to remember having a conversation about it with Monica not long ago.

I look in the mirror that we have in the bedroom, and remember that I hadn't had the chance to get out of my pyjamas and bathrobe yet. I walk over to the closet, and find my work clothes for Ralph Lauren. It takes me less than five minutes to get ready, and then I go to the en-suite bathroom to apply a light layer of make-up for work and run a brush through my hair and tie it up.

I walk back down to the kitchen to find Ross. He was washing up. "Oh hey, Rach," he said, when he saw me. He took another look and realised that I was dressed for work. "I should probably go and get ready for work, but I don't want to leave you to have to wash up alone."

"No, it's fine," I say, "you go get dressed. Did the girls go upstairs to finish getting ready?"

"Yeah," Ross said. I heave a sigh of relief, because it means that I get to relax rather than have to worry about the girls.

I take over the washing up, which I kind of regretted but I wasn't too bothered about because the whole sharing responsibilities thing was part of a relationship, and I didn't want to lose Ross for some stupid thing like this. It took us long enough to get back together for real, and we have both worked really hard to keep it that way because it didn't seem fair on Emma and Lara, at the end of the day.

When I'm done with the washing up, I walk straight into the living room. The huge plasma TV stands opposite the big cream couch, with a marble topped coffee table in the middle. The remote sits on the couch. I pick it up and flick through the channels. There is a rerun of Keeping up with the Kardashians on, so I click on it.

Don't get me wrong – I know that the show has no storyline and basically pointless. You do still have to admit that it is entertaining, and honestly a good laugh. Emma and Lara roast me all the time because of watching it, and 'The Bachelor' and 'The Bachelorette' as well. To be fair, I think that they secretly enjoy them, and they just don't want to admit that they watch the same shows as their Mom.

Ross disapproves of what I watch, but he has learnt that it isn't worth commenting after a number of fights that we had initially over it and realising that we would probably leave each other if the fights were actually serious. He still watches documentaries most of the time, with the exception of Sherlock, which I personally found incredibly boring. British TV shows are weird, because they never have any interesting drama that is available over here or that I understand.

I get so engrossed in the episode of KUTWK that I don't notice Ross coming in, until he says, "Rachel, I'm about to go to the college!"

He is still a Palaeontology professor at the sane college. I used to tell him that he would probably get bored of the job, but I think that was mainly because when I would have to explain to people that we meet at parties, I didn't want people to think that we were boring smartasses. Nevertheless, he was adamant that that would never happen, and I have now just resigned to that as a hope that I would have to let go of.

Comparably, people are still impressed when I tell them that I work for Ralph Lauren. The company does provide seriously prestigious jobs, and so I don't technically have to say that I got an offer for the job basically for free. Since entering Ralph Lauren, I have managed to upgrade myself to the status of being one of the main style designers. That was honestly my dream role, and even Ross is proud of me that I managed to prove myself worthy to be able to climb up to the job I really wanted.

Both our jobs pay well, so we could live comfortably. When I say comfortably, it basically means that we are able to pay the bills and support my shopaholic habits. That is one thing that really hasn't changed as I have grown up and become more responsible as a parent. All the others in our friendship group are like that as well, and that is one thing that makes me so happy.

I hug Ross goodbye and he goes out to take his car out to work. I shout from the foot of the staircase goodbye to Lara and Emma, and then get in my own car and drive to the New York Ralph Lauren headquarters. Ross and I have our own cars because both of our jobs demand it, as they are on opposite sides of town and we wouldn't be able to share one. We also have the cash, so we can spare it.

A/N: Here is the end of the second book in the Familiar Faces trilogy! Please check out the first book which is led by Monica and Chandler. Again all rights for the characters and places that are mentioned here that are from the original series are the creation of David Crane and Marta Kauffman, so don't credit me. Please continue to review and I hope you enjoy the beginning of the second book in this trilogy. Thanks again for the support on the last one already, and I hope everyone who reads this has a good day.