Wow I never ever thought I'd go back to this, but here I am about half a year later. Fashionably late :p This chapter is dedicated to Pammy whose great review, that I got this morning, motivated to write this again, and to Ez and Sarah my sweetie pies.
Disclaimer; I don't own the friends characters or the last line of the fic which is from This is Yesterday – Manic Street Preachers *takes her filthy mitts off them*
AU: You might wanna go re read the rest of this fic cause it's been such a long time since this has been updated that even I had to ;)
Diluted sunlight fought it's way slowly through the dusty air of Monica's room as the long night passed on into the day, but the 2 figures who lay in her bed remained asleep. Wrapped around one another in a possessive embrace, their bodies entwined as though their limbs would never let go.
Chandler floated serenely in the space between sleep and waking, his face dappled with morning light, a small smile tugging at the corner of his mouth. 'I'm with Monica' floated slowly through his mind, he was determined to catch the wisps of that thought as he woke, catch them and make them real. Too many times he'd been taunted with dreams of Monica, dreams that had seemed so real but had been blown away like smoke by the harsh light of day. But this dream was different; something had shifted so that the wisps of dream now seemed like solid fragments of truth. As Chandler awoke, his mind struggling out of sleep to grasp onto reality, his arms tightened and grasped onto Monica, for so many years his dream, his torment, now finally his reality.
He wanted to catch the morning and suspend it in time, suspend it high above the problems he knew they would soon have to talk about, the doubts he had shoved to the back of his mind in return for being able to hold and love her again for a night. He buried his face in her neck and started to nibble delicately at the soft skin causing Monica to slowly open watery eyes.
"Morning Sweetheart," he whispered softly into her ear.
"Morning," she mumbled in return, sitting up and pulling the sheets around her body, trying desperately to make sense of the incredible situation she found herself in. Monica could remember certain parts of the night before with sharp clarity, seeing Chandler standing desperately shielded in rain, inviting him into her apartment, initiating sex with a certainty she hadn't felt for a long time. Yet other parts of the night just jumbled together into a teaming mass of emotions, a teaming mess of emotions.
She felt fear mix with the permanent shard of guilt that seemed to have lodged itself in her heart. She could in no way say she enjoyed her life as it was now, but she did enjoy the security of the routine she had fallen into. Her routine allowed her to turn her emotions off, to view her life from behind her eyes as merely a spectator sport, something that she no longer fully participated in. With Chandler's reappearance long sedated feelings were awakening and she didn't know if she could deal with them. But she wanted more than anything to be able to, to be able to keep Chandler in what had become of her life. As he pushed her gently back down onto the bed she gripped on, as if for dear life. As they made love she imagined he was the only thing keeping her from drowning in the sea of her newly awakened emotions.
They lay in each other's arms afterwards, breathing in and out rhythmically, trying to both envelop and break the silence that hung in the air of the room like a fog. Neither one wanted to speak, neither wanted to break the pretence of normalcy that the silence offered, but both knew that if they wanted this new, strange flower of a relationship that had blossomed to live they had to face the questions that their old life together left lingering.
"We needed to talk" they both intoned at the same time. Monica laughed nervously into Chandler's chest and the silence dropped onto them again. Chandler was now waking up from his pretend reality with Monica. Yes she was here, with him, but things were not perfect, he was still filled with grief and anger at her leaving, and now these feelings were rising to the surface, dangerously near his mouth, where they could say something he would later regret. However he felt about Monica, he knew one thing, he was going to do everything in his power to make her stay with him, he simply couldn't stand loosing her again. Removing his hands from around her, as though that would allow him to order his thoughts more clearly Chandler grabbed his boxers, put them on and walked to the other side of the room, distancing himself as best he could in preparation for the conversation ahead. Taking a deep breath he took the plunge,
" Why did you leave Mon?"
'Trust him to go for the most complicated question first' thought Monica to herself, the question that not only she didn't know the answer to, but the question she had forced herself not to think about in fear that it would drive her mad.
" I don't know," she answered simply with a small shrug.
" I don't know," repeated Chandler, rolling the words around on his tongue. They produced a bitter taste in his mouth, " So let me get this right Mon, you left me, after 4 years, left me thinking you were dead, left me wishing I was dead and you don't even know why?!!" He struggled to keep his voice down, he didn't want to let the conversation get out of control, he had too many thoughts spiralling around his head to take that chance.
" I don't know," she echoed in a small voice. Snapping her head up she looked him in the eyes, "But I do know that I never ever wanted to hurt you Chandler. That's why partly why I left," she sighed to herself, and smiled a sarcastic smile, " So I guess I do know. I……I…I just wanted an escape, I want an escape. I just want to be free…." She stopped herself abruptly and her head fell back down, her hair shielding her face.
Chandler stood and watched her impassively. He wanted so much to just hold her, but holding her wasn't going to magically erase all their problems, no matter how much he wanted it to.
"This is so surreal" Chandler observed, " Here I am sitting with my 'dead' wife," Monica winced, "and things are so different, we are so different yet my feelings towards you are just the same. Monica I love you so much, despite all the differences and that, in some ways, is the hardest thing to deal with"
He stood upright and wandered around the room, chuckling as he noticed the pile of old clothing in the corner,
" Okay I take that back, the hardest thing to deal with is that you've turned out to be messy after all."
'Okay Chandler' he thought to himself, 'you haven't changed that much, you still pull out the same defense mechanism, still make jokes at totally inappropriate times.' But Monica seemed to appreciate the momentary lapse in tension; she stopped picking at the sheets with her fingernail and managed to look at him again,
" I don't know Chandler, you'd be surprised,"
' Yeah,' she added as an after thought to herself, 'you'd be surprised to see what a mess my whole life has become'
Chandler sat back down next to her on the bed and placed an arm around her shoulders, deciding to leave the unanswerable questions for now, to leave the important questions and just pick away at the little things in the hope that one-day he would be able to reach the core of the matter, be able to answer the 'why?'
" Tell me why I'd be surprised, what's your new life like? Surely it can't be that bad," Monica raised a sceptical eyebrow, " I said that bad"
"Well, umm, where do I begin?" Monica stuttered, 'Where do you begin? At the fact that you have no friends? Or the fact that you live your life completely inside your own head? Or the fact that you effectively have no life at all without him?'
" How's about what do you work as?" Chandler smiled encouragingly down at her. Monica felt like she was being patronised, but then again she figured he had the right to treat her whatever way he felt fit.
"Well I work at the bar down the road from here as a waitress. It's a dump, but it's better than being unemployed." Again she drove the conversation to a halt. Absentmindedly she started twirling her wedding ring on her finger. The glint of gold caught Chandler's eye and reminded him of the last question he wanted to ask but the first one he needed an answer for.
" Mon, do you……I mean are you…do you have a boyfriend?" he held his breath in anticipation for the answer. Monica shook her head in an emphatic no
" Of course not, I could never, I mean, I would never do that to you."
"And yet you would walk out on me," Chandler whispered, his voice heavy with sadness not accusation. Monica chose to ignore his comment, chose not to deal with it, and instead changed the subject to marginally safer grounds,
" How are the rest of the gang? Do you still see them?"
"Yeah, well I see Phoebe and Joey, they got married and now have this gorgeous little girl called Lily, she did the cutest thing the other day…"
"Chandler," Monica cut him off, glad that Phoebe and Joey had managed to move on but more concerned with the absence of Rachel in his answer, " What about Rach? How is she?"
" She's.." Chandler sighed, not wanting to tell Monica about how none of them had seen Rachel for 3 years, not since she had moved to LA, vowing to never come back because New York held too many unhappy memories of lost friends and lost loves, " She's…gone. I we haven't seen her in 3 years, she decided to move to LA," he reached for Monica's hand and squeezed gently, " California dreaming I guess," being met with silence he continued, " I don't know, she took the death of Ross very hard, almost as hard as……" he trailed off noticing Monica was staring doggedly at a spot on the wall, he knew her well enough to know she was trying her hardest to fight down tears. " Well she took it hard."
Monica spoke up, her voice small and cracked, sounding unsteady and unsure of itself,
" I miss her, I miss you, I miss everyone so much,"
She turned her head and laid her cheek on Chandler's bare chest. She felt like the cracks in her mind were beginning to open again, like she was made of very thin glass, glass that was cracked and damaged, glass that if she wasn't careful would shatter into a thousand tiny pieces. Thousands of tiny fragments of herself, fragments that would cut everyone around her when she broke.
Chandler stroked her dark hair carefully, as if he was aware of her delicacy, aware of her fragile mind.
" Come back to New York with me Mon. Please, we can't live without each other, not properly, you know that. Come back home sweetie."
She just nodded. They both knew they had many questions to answer, many issues to solve but a feeling of hope hung in the air around them. Hope mingled with unspoken words, answers and promises that neither of them could bring themselves to say.
'Do not listen to a word I say, just listen to what I can keep silent'TBC
I'm pleading with you all, if you have a heart please review!