Hello old/new readers! If you're old, welcome to my new story! New readers, you may have seen my other fic on here before. Long story short: this is my first multichapter so apologies if it isn't as great. This fic is Michael/Amanda (as per usual ) and follows the De Santas throughout the first week that are back after Ending C. In this first chapter, the kids talk a little sense into their stubborn parents. As usual, enjoy, review, and all of that :)

"Honey, I'm home…" Michael said sarcastically, the statement nothing more than a quiet mutter under his breath as he quietly shut the front door behind him. For once, the house was silent; even Jimmy had stopped playing his video games and had gone to bed at this hour. His eyes briefly darted towards the digital clock, the red numbers burning into his eyes in the darkness of the house. 4:00am, he groaned internally and briefly wondered why Trevor had them go across the state to tie up those loose ends.

He had just begun trudging upstairs when he saw a light on in the living room. As soon as he stepped into the living room, he was greeted by the sight of Amanda curled up in one of the chairs, fast asleep, and an empty mug of coffee next to her. The dim light of the lamp casted shadows on her face, highlighting the dark circles under her eyes and her lips that were pursed in worry. A small smile crossed his face at the familiar sight. Old habits die hard…

Michael gently shook her shoulder to wake her up. "Baby, I'm home."

Amanda stirred under his touch for a moment before slowly starting to wake up. She yawned, a content smile on her face before realizing that it was him and wrapping her arms around his neck. "You're back," she grinned, voice muffled from burying her face into his shoulder. She inhaled deeply into his shoulder, breathing in his scent of cigarette smoke and the leather of his jacket. "Welcome home, darling."

"Shouldn't I be saying that to you?" he asked, wrapping his own arms around her. "You've been living at a hotel for about a week now."

"Don't be a smart ass," she protested weakly. The venom in the comment was lost in her grogginess, making her sound more cute than intimidating. "Me and the kids came home as soon as you said it was safe and that was like ten hours ago…"

"Ah, sorry 'bout that. Fuckin' Trevor sent me on an errand halfway across San Andreas. Besides, you know you didn't have to wait for me," he said softly.

"I wasn't. Swear." She stared at him, a deadpan look on her face. He smirked at her and allowed his eyes to purposefully wander over to the clock she'd kept right to her that she had no doubt been checking all night and the cup of coffee that hadn't kept her awake.

"Right," he said knowingly before grabbing her hand and starting to lead her upstairs. "Thankfully you won't have to do that any longer."

"Oh, really?" she murmured tiredly, allowing him to drag her along because she was too tired and lazy to get up the stairs herself.

"Yeah. I'm done with that crazy shit, babe. For real this time. Things are gonna be a lot better from now on, you'll see," he reassured her, confidence dripping from his voice. He led her into their bedroom, where Amanda not-so-elegantly flopped down onto the bed with a sigh.

"I've heard that before…" she said bitterly, leaning up on her elbows and watching as he sat down next to her and started taking off his jacket. There was something apprehensive, almost cautious in the way she looked at him, the way she talked to him, and he knew that she didn't believe him.

"I'm serious about this, okay?" His voice grew soft, almost urgent for a second, and he made sure to look deeply into her eyes when he said, "We aren't gonna make the same mistakes we did, Amanda."

She couldn't quite meet his gaze. "Hmmm…" she drawled out hesitantly before hastily changing the subject. "I'm gonna go back to sleep. All of that not waiting for you took a lot out of me…"

Michael sighed at her answer, or lack thereof, but decided to let it slide until the morning. "Me too. I'm fuckin' beat, 'Mand," he muttered as he kicked his shoes off and stripped down to his boxers. He laid down next to her and gently wrapped an arm around her waist, acutely aware of the way her body tensed beneath his touch for a moment. "Good night, sweetheart. I love you."

She shut her eyes next to him. "Good night, Michael."

He couldn't sleep much that night. If it wasn't the insomnia, it was the nightmares. Every time he shut his eyes, it was the same horrible images of that night playing in his head. His mind tortured him with all of the things that could have happened if he hadn't been fast enough to stop Merryweather. Him dying, Tracey dying, Amanda dying…

Michael sat up and looked over at his wife at that last thought, needing some reassurance that she was actually there and that it'd just been some dream. Somewhere in between his second and third nightmare, she'd squirmed out of his arms and gone as far away to her edge of the bed she could.

He sighed, running a hand through his hand through his hair that was damp with sweat. It was as if they'd gone back in time six months and nothing had changed. He could only hope that it wasn't a permanent thing.

Resigned to his fate, Michael laid back down and shut his eyes, hoping to get at least a few hours of sleep.

He woke up the next morning to see her side of the bed unoccupied. Not thinking anything of it, he got dressed and went downstairs, only finding his son huddled over his laptop at the dinner table. "Hey, kid," Michael greeted with a yawn, looking around the nearly empty house. "Have you seen your mother?"

Jimmy barely even looked up from his computer. "Oh, hey, Dad," he said distractedly. He frowned down at the laptop in concentration, no doubt playing some game judging by the sounds of simulated gunfire and insults carrying through his headphones. "Ugh, get off my face, dude!" he growled before shutting the computer with a frustrated thud and finally looking back up at Michael. "Uh, Mom's out."

Michael glanced at the clock, raising his eyebrows in suspicion upon seeing that it was barely the afternoon. "She's out? Doing what?"

"Well…"

"Why are we here?" Tracey whined as her mother pulled her into probably the tenth shop they'd been in since she'd been basically forced to go shopping.

Amanda just dragged her further along, sighing in irritation. One of her arms continued tugging her daughter along, the other hauling all of her shopping bags. "We are here to have some quality mother-daughter time, Tracey. Or are you not ready for that step in our newly healthy family relationship yet?"

Tracey scoffed at that. "And you are?" she snapped, making Amanda stop dead in her tracks. Amanda turned around to face her, eyes filled with thinly veiled anger and hurt. She recovered quickly enough, managing to keep her emotions from her eyes, but the way that her hands tightened around the bags betrayed it.

"Why do you say that?" she asked nervously, trying her best to hide her feelings from her daughter. She tried to distract herself by looking at clothes, but couldn't shake her nervousness.

"Oh, come on, Mom," Tracey rolled her eyes in annoyance. "You always take me out whenever you want to complain about your problems. And we all know that you've been acting weird ever since you and Dad got back together."

"I'm not acting like anything!" Amanda tried to defend herself hopelessly. "Jesus...why can't we just have a nice day out without arguing for once?"

"Don't try to change the subject. Look...I know you don't want to talk about this stuff, but I don't want things to turn into what happened last time," Tracey's voice grew soft for a second, and it quickly made Amanda's anger fade because she'd never heard her daughter sound so serious before.

"Okay, fine," she conceded. "What do you want to talk about?"

"How are things between you and Dad?" Tracey immediately asked.

"We're fine-" Amanda started to lie before quickly being interrupted.

"The truth, Mom."

"Things are...they're weird, okay?" Amanda finally sighed in defeat. "I mean, fuck, Tracey, one minute we were back to normal and the next there were guns pointed at our heads! So, forgive me if I'm still not over that yet."

"Do you seriously think that if Dad had any idea that that would've happened he would've let us move back in?" Tracey asked, eyebrows raised in disbelief. "Say what you want about him, but he's done as much as he can to protect us. And I don't think that's the only thing you're worried about."

"I don't know...there's a lot of things between us that are fucked up right now. He keeps telling me that this time will be better, that he's different now...but he's promised me this kind of thing so many times before. When we moved here, when we were fighting, before we left...and nothing ever changed. I just don't know if he's going to change now…" Amanda admitted, voice dropping to nothing more than a shaky whisper.

"I can't pretend to know everything about your relationship because you two have over twenty years of fucked up experiences that I don't know about…" Tracey laughed to herself as she started to look through the clothes in the store. "...but I think that he's really changing this time. Dad was a mess while we were gone, you saw how destroyed the house was when we came back. I talked to him a couple times and he wouldn't stop begging us for one more chance. I don't know...I think you two should talk about it. You guys obviously have a lot more problems than a five-minute screaming match in front of our therapist can fix."

"Since when are you the one giving me relationship advice?" Amanda managed to let out a weak laugh. "And since when did you get so good at it?"

"Since you and Dad obviously didn't stay together because of your amazing communication skills, I figured I should just do it for you," Tracey said sarcastically. "So, are we gonna keep shopping or are you gonna go talk to him?"

Amanda paused for a moment at that, letting her eyes linger over a skimpy black dress before impulsively taking it off the rack and turning back to her daughter. "Alright. I'm ready."

"What's she doing with Tracey?" Michael asked, sitting next to his son at the table.

"I dunno…" Jimmy shrugged indifferently. "I asked and they just said it was girl stuff or some shit."

"Of course they did," Michael chuckled. They lapsed into a kind of awkward silence for a minute before he turned back to his son. "Uh, kid, I wanted to ask you something."

"Ask away, Dad…" Jimmy said distractedly, focusing on his laptop again.

"It's about your mother. Has...has she been different lately? After that, uh...that one night?" Michael stuttered around the subject, unwilling to bring himself to talk about it. "We haven't really talked about anything since then and I wanted to know if she's said anything to you about it."

"No offense, pop, but we were all pretty fucked up after that night," Jimmy said harshly, and Michael knew that he was sore over the topic, too. "She didn't talk about it and neither did Tracey and I. Mom just mostly stayed in her room the whole time."

"Ah, okay…" Michael said quietly, allowing them to go into an even more uncomfortable silence. "Sometimes I think we needed more time," he suddenly blurted out after a while.

Jimmy just sighed. "What are you talking about?"

"Your mom and I. Sometimes I wonder if we needed more time to move beyond screaming at each other...sometimes I wonder if maybe she'd be better off without me. This shit wouldn't have happened if you guys were still away from me…" Michael let out a deep sigh, putting his head in his hands. What he'd really like was a drink to distract himself from all of the things that were already going wrong, but he knew exactly what road that led down and that wasn't a path he would like to repeat. "I just don't want things to be more of the same…"

"And they won't as long as you don't, like, run off to rob banks and kill people again instead of being with us. Or, y'know, try to destroy our family again," Jimmy suddenly snapped out at him. Years of bitterness were starting to surface and Michael had the feeling that this was just the beginning of it.

"Ah, I'm sorry-look, this conversation...it's not going the way I thought it would," Michael quickly tried to backtrack before his son scoffed at him, rolling his eyes.

"What, you wanted me to give you a hug and absolve you of your many sins because you were trying your best?" he asked sarcastically.

"Well, yeah, that would have been nice," Michael almost laughed despite the circumstances, before his voice grew quiet and deadly serious. "Look, Jim, I know that I'm a shitty person and a shitty dad, but I love you and things will be different, alright? I'm not going anywhere anytime soon."

"Alright, jeez...why do you have to get so emotional?" Jimmy managed to get out through a shaky voice. "But, uh, thanks, Dad…"

"Anytime, bud," Michael managed a small smile. "And, Jim?"

"Yeah, Dad?"

"I'm really happy to have you all back."

"All of that fighting was kinda shitty…" Jimmy finally admitted.

"Well, that much fighting ain't gonna happen now, I promise," Michael said, confidence dripping from his voice.

"You know, it's not all gonna magically be better. You can't take Mom for granted again."

"I won't. A...a lot of stuff has happened between us these past few years and I..." Michael paused as he scratched at the back of his neck nervously, unable to find the right words to say. "I, uhm, I treated her badly, I see that now…"

"Maybe you should tell her that. Could go a long way with her," Jimmy shrugged indifferently, but his tone was knowing.

"Yeah, maybe-" Michael started before the sound of the front door opening cut him off.

"We got your daughter some beautiful things!" Amanda called out in a singsong voice as she stepped inside the house. A small smile worked across Michael's face as he heard her voice and he quickly walked over to her, greeted by the sight of her and Tracey practically engulfed in shopping bags.

"And your wife!" Tracey added with a small wink towards Amanda.

"And, that, ladies, is why I work hard," Michael said with a smirk. His gaze wandered over to his wife, eyes meeting with hers for the briefest of moments before they both had to look away.

Tracey quickly broke the awkwardness between them by walking over to where her brother was sitting. "Jimmy, let's go upstairs so I can show you some of the cool shit I got."

"But I don't want to-" Jimmy immediately started whining in his typical fashion.

"Let's. Go. Upstairs," Tracey emphasized every word, eyes darting between Michael and Amanda pointedly.

"Ohhh," Jimmy finally understood what she was saying (or trying to say) and got up, hastily following his sister upstairs, leaving Michael and Amanda standing there, unsure of whether to laugh at their children's poor attempt at being subtle or panic at being left alone with each other.

"Hey…" Michael said nervously, uncomfortably shifting on his feet.

Amanda just awkwardly smiled at him. "Hey…" she echoed.

"So, uh, how was your shopping?" he asked in a desperate attempt to make small talk.

"Good…it was good," she said quickly, eyes averting to the floor.

The two of them lapsed into an almost unbearable silence. Both of them had so many things to say to each other, but weren't quite sure how to say it, so they just stood there for who knew who long before they both couldn't stand it.

"Amanda, I-"

"Michael-"

They started talking at the exact same time, making the both of them laugh shakily, and Michael just gestured for her to go first because he was too scared to do it himself. "Ladies first," he said.

"Michael, I...I wanna talk to you. About us," she started, still staring down at the floor.

"I was just about to tell you the same thing," he said. He smiled at her reassuringly, trying his best to keep his apparent nervousness at bay. It wasn't all that often that he was this nervous, but Amanda did that to him and now was no exception.

"I don't want things to be weird between us, Michael," she started, biting her lip in that distracting way like she always did when she was hesitant about something. "So...I need to ask you something, something that I need to know."

"Anything," was his quick reply.

"Are you serious about this, Michael? About us?" Amanda finally looked up to meet his gaze, and when she did, her own eyes were filled with something between fear and hopefulness.

"Yeah, I...of course. Look, I've never been more serious about anything, okay?" he said quietly, reaching over and grabbing her hand, shaking beneath his.

"I mean, you've lied about this so many times …" she sighed. "I can't have it turn into what happened last time, I can't…"

He just gripped her hand a little tighter. Looking into her tear-filled eyes, he could see what she meant, what she couldn't go through again. Years of staring at the bedroom ceiling, wondering if the TV would turn ever turn off downstairs, wondering if he'd ever come to bed. Years of defending their kids from his slurred words and trying to protect their image of him at the same time. "I'm sorry, Amanda…" he whispered, one of his fingers running along her wedding ring. "I brought this all shit down on myself and I took you with me. You, ah...you deserved better than me. "

She wiped away the tears starting to form in her eyes. "Yeah, well, we were both kind of the king and queen of shitty. I did a lot of stupid things that I regret, too, Michael. It's not all your fault."

Michael just nodded sadly at that. "You know…I'm not lying about this now," he said in a low voice.

"Are we going to be faithful?" she asked.

"Yes," he said immediately. A small shiver ran through him at those memories, at all of the lying and cheating they'd done to each other, and was determined not to repeat those same mistakes.

"Promise me, Michael," she said desperately, clutching onto his hand as if it were a lifeline.

"I promise you," he reassured her, pressing a gentle kiss to her hand. "Amanda, we're gonna do it and we're gonna do it right this time. It isn't gonna be be perfect...we are who we are...but we can do this, darlin'."

Slowly, Amanda relaxed under his touch and his constant promises that things would be better. He quickly brushed away any tears that threatened to escape her eyes and made sure that none did until she calmed down. They stayed like that for a while; him silently holding her while she regained her composure. What he didn't expect next was the soft smile she gave him or the delicate kiss that she pressed to his lips. "Let's make this work," she whispered in his ear.