I'm glad you guys like that I started this fic again ;) I even started writing for this series again, so there will be a lot more of these in the future! Most are still very close to Chandler as a child/adolescent and somehow linked to the divorce, but I've written some that are later in his life and might even be a bit Mondler oriented... I mean, is it a surprise, really? But yeah, I'm trying to write about different times :D
First time he went on stage
As much as it bothered and annoyed him, Chandler was in Las Vegas, thus knew no one, which was in itself a good thing. It didn't take the humiliation out of having to play in his father's show. That was his summer job. People mowed lawns, others cleaned cars, some were babysitters… Chandler danced in his father's show. It hadn't been his goal when he had come here. They hadn't seen each other in a long time, and his mother was busy with her book tour, so he was stuck with his father for the summer.
They didn't talk much. They couldn't talk much. They had nothing to talk about. Charles had already asked how boarding school was going, and was running out of subjects. So when one of his dancers got sick, he had thought it would please Chandler to replace him. He had a weird sense of his son's taste.
He was already "the gay one" in boarding school, dancing in a drag show in Vegas wasn't exactly in his list of things to do before he died. It was on the other list. The list of things he'd rather die in horrible pain before anyone saw him do this. But he was dying from boredom and had thought it would help him realize what the value of money was, because his mother got him anything he wanted, and he had no notion of money whatsoever.
It turned out, earning money was a good feeling. Doing a work for something was rewarding. And he always found a way to mess something up intentionally to make people laugh. It worked well, for some reason.
If he fled as soon as guys started to compliment him, he actually enjoyed being on stage. It was good, to be someone he was not. In that case, a gay dancer. Both characteristics were very opposite to his true self, but he didn't particularly like his true self, so it was a good distraction.
Not that he ever mentioned this job to anyone else, or talked about it to his father. He pretended hating it, and in a way he did, because he didn't really want to be here, he didn't really know to dance, and he didn't really want to spend his summer with his father. But the stage fright, the feeling of dying inside before being in front of an audience, where every fear fled as quickly as it had been suffocating… That feeling of bliss was the closest thing to being happy near one of his parents during his adolescence.