Chapter 1: Agony

It was a dark and rainy night, returning from St. Vincent's hospital.

Seated three abreast in the back of this cab, Chandler was starting to get concerned.

He chanced another surreptitious glance to his left, staring past a quiet Rachel to observe Monica in profile. The beautiful chef, his best friend, was staring out the window. The glow from the streetlights outside the windowpane cast her lovely face in a sharp relief, so that some of her features were cloaked in shadow….. while her tears glistened in all too clear light. From the way the shadows of the rain droplets outside danced on her skin, it was as if Monica's own face was a part of the downpour.

For anyone else who noticed, the imagery might have actually masked how much Monica was weeping. Chandler felt his heart ache from how he could tell better.

She'd been crying, off and on, ever since she had hung up with her father on that payphone in the waiting room. Or, tried to hang up - her hands had been shaking so badly, Chandler had needed to hang up for her before gathering her in his arms.

The tears had come roaring back with a vengeance the moment Monica's little nephew had come screaming into the world and she had held little Ben for the first time, but at that moment Chandler had figured they were happy tears. Happiness mixed in with some bitterness, maybe, now that he thought back on it.

It was impossible not to feel sorry for Monica, especially when one considered how the indignity must hit all the worse, knowing that her big brother was, once again, first in everything - including now having a child.

The cab pulled up to the apartment complex on Bedford Street. With a sniffle, Monica exited into the drizzle, Rachel scooting out to follow her. Chandler hastily paid the cab driver before climbing out the opposite door and rounding the car to the curb; he was nearly blinded by the headlights of a second cab - the one carrying Ross, Joey and Phoebe - pulling up behind them, and he hissed at the glare. He jogged to catch up with Rachel and Monica, now under the awning eaves and opening the door to enter the complex.

Chandler knew he should probably at least wait for Joey, yet he couldn't help but hover. He dared not stare, for fear that Monica would notice and bark at him and maybe even at Rachel to leave her alone. He shared a look with Rachel now and found her biting her lip, almost searching his eyes for guidance. As if he had any to share. They were both tiptoeing around their friend like she was a piece of glass in danger of being shattered, and they both knew it.

The climb up the stairs had now taken on the tenor of a funeral march, a despondent Monica setting the pace. For once in his life, Chandler bit back a quip about her holding up the line and that the Splash Mountain ride was going to close by the time they got on. It was the exceedingly rare moment that Chandler grasped some awareness regarding how there was a time and a place for jokes, and this was not one of them.

He and the girls staggered into the hallway leading to Apartments 19 and 20; behind and below them, Chandler could hear the voices of his friends echoing up the stairwell, preceding their ascent - Joey and Ross, babbling excitedly about the new baby. When Rachel opened the door to 20, he found himself ambling in along after them, pausing only when Rachel sent him a look over her shoulder. 'I got her,' she mouthed to him with an easy smile, lurching forward to steer Monica towards her room, rubbing her best friend's back.

At a loss for anything to do or be helpful, Chandler cast his gaze about the girls' kitchen. His eyes happened to zero in on a glass left out on the table, and he moved to pick it up and put it away, marveling at how it didn't seem like Monica at all, to leave something so out of place. Well, and here he chuckled, at least the glass was on a coaster….

Lifting the coaster along with the glass, something caught Chandler's eye thanks to lights from the outside street lamps. Curiosity getting the better of him, he squinted in the dimness of this apartment to read the paper beneath. From what he could make out, it appeared to be a….

…. A profile from a sperm donor? There was no sign of Monica's neat handwriting anywhere on the document; it appeared to be blank.

Chandler frowned. He vaguely knew what sperm banks were, even though he (along with probably Joey) still couldn't help but picture an actual bank - as in, a bank with money - when he thought of one. He wondered if a sperm bank also had little tellers where folks could make a sperm deposit into a sperm checking account. Where women could freeze their embryos and call it 'savings.'

Off-hand, Chandler flashed back to the night he had been in that bank - a financial one, not one with sperm - and the power had gone out, leaving him trapped in a teller lobby with that really hot girl. What was her name….?

He shook his head to clear it. He was getting off-topic. More pertinent and at hand was why did Monica have the profile of an anonymous sperm donor on her….?

"Chandler?" He jerked sharply, startled, at Rachel's voice. She was in the doorway of Monica's bedroom, already in her pajamas. "I got Monica to bed. What are you doing?"

"Uhhh…. Uhhh…." Chandler stuttered, knowing full well that nobody likes a nosy noozer. "Dear God, this coaster has condensation on it! Smudges everywhere!" Tossing the coaster and the glass into the sink, he windmilled comically from the apartment, fleeing across the hall and into his own pad, where Joey was waiting. Predictably, Chandler's roommate was bathed in the light of the refrigerator door, left open, eating a sandwich.

"Where have you been?" Joey sprayed him with a mouthful of food.

Chandler scrunched up his face. "Go to bed, Tribbipanini," he grumbled, before stomping for his own room.

Chandler couldn't sleep.

He was tossing and turning, tangling himself in his own sheets, and not in that really good way when you were lost in the passion of doing a girl. The fact that it was late spring, the prelude to a stifling summer, didn't help - he felt too warm.

Monica's tear-streaked face danced behind his eyelids. Her words from back at the hospital rang in his ears: No fair! She gets two! I don't even have one! In the moment, it had been almost cute, to see her almost mad with jealousy, except that was before the crying had started.

And then there was the matter of that damn form…. The sperm donor applicant. There hadn't been any name on the paper - just a number.

Chandler's thoughts ping-ponged back in a rather disorganized fashion, as was his norm, back to the waiting room. All right, tell you what: when we're 40, if neither of us are married… what do you say you and I get together and have one?

Suddenly, the two thoughts converged in an unsettling and yet perversely genius way, enough to make Chandler sit bolt upright in bed. It was like a lightning strike had flashed across his brain.

Before he could think any further, Chandler found himself out of bed, flinging a bathrobe around himself and sprinting across his and Joey's apartment without any regard towards keeping it down so his roommate could sleep. He lunged across the hall and began pounding on the door to Apartment 20, until he could hear the padding of deliberate feet coming fast towards him from the other side. He didn't have time to consider that it might be Rachel who was about to answer and no doubt ream him out, when the door flung open and Monica's face, beautiful even when it was burning with outrage, appeared.

"Do you have any idea what time…. - Chandler….?" She pulled up short, blinking.

"Use me," Chandler rasped desperately.

Monica blinked again. "What?"

"Use me. Use my sperm."

She guffawed out her laughter through a raspberry. "Little late for making passes, pal. Unless someone woke up on the wrong side of Joey…"

"Joey really isn't into the whole possession of other people's bodies thing! If he were, he wouldn't have flubbed his audition for Ghost!" Chandler's gaze roved over her urgently. "You can have my sperm, Mon. Let me help give you a baby."