Author's note: I just wanted to say thanks to anyone who's taking a chance on this fic and reading past the first chapter. I know I was taking a risk with both the subject matter and how I chose to tell the story, so seriously, thanks for giving it a shot.

Also, since there is more than one artist with a song called "Light Years", I'd like to note that this story is named after the one by Pearl Jam.

I roll out of bed at eight because my internal clock seems to think it's eleven. You would think they'd have come up with a cure for jet lag by now.

I walk past Chase's bedroom door, knowing that he'll be unconscious for a few more hours after that pre-dawn fishing excursion. I like that mother-daughter bonding time happens in normal daylight.

Mom is already up, sipping coffee in the kitchen while working over a crossword puzzle on the newsscreen. She and dad usually do them together when they have the time, but I guess he was out early today.

"G'morning," I mumble before pouring myself a cup of black coffee. I learned long ago to forgo sugar and milk.

"Morning. You're up early," mom notes with a smile.

"Jet lag. Wanna go into the hospital early and then go shopping or something?" Really, going shopping means getting to pick things out at Neiman Marcus and having mom pay for it. (It's possible that I'm a little spoiled.)

"Yeah, sure. We can pick up breakfast on the way." She never did learn to cook. "Do you think Chase wants to come?"

"Nah, he's out until the early afternoon. If there's cereal in the house, he'll be fine."

"Okay. I'm going to go shower then," she gets up and rinses her mug.

I pull her abandoned crossword puzzle across the table to see if I can finish it. Strangely enough, there are only a couple words filled in. Oh well. I close the puzzle screen and open up the celebrity gossip section, my one (okay, I have many) guilty pleasure.

"Hey, do you want to drive? You probably miss it," mom says, as we enter the garage.

"Mom, Chase and I drove like three thousand miles to get here."

"Well, you probably miss driving something fast."

She knows me too well. "The Porsche?" I ask hopefully.

She hands me the keys and I fight a squeal. I love this car. I had dreams about this car whenever I fell asleep standing (because there's no room to fall over) on the horrendously crowded 1 train. There are five cars in here but this one is just for special occasions of mother and daughter, or father and son, or father and daughter, or mother and son, or father and mother... basically, one of my parents has to be in the car, and there are only two seats.

Chase is going to be so jealous. I'd consider waking him up just to rub it in his face, but then he might decide to come along and then we'd have to take one of the sedans. Screw that.

I place my hand on the door-handle and listen to the car's engine purr to life. The seat moves automatically to adjust to my height and I get in, taking in the amazing leather smell. "Good morning, Julia, where would you like to go today?"

"Seattle Grace Hospital," I say. I have no idea how anyone ever got around before nav systems came along.

"Excellent. You will arrive at your destination in approximately fifty-seven minutes," says the pleasant voice of the car.

"Jules, we've made this trip thousands of times, you can turn the thing off." Mom grew up in a time where cars didn't talk, and she still thinks it's weird but dad gets a huge kick out of it.

"The next Bainbridge Island Ferry will depart in sixteen minutes."

"See?" I say, "If I turned it off, I wouldn't get useful information like that."

"It leaves every twenty minutes!"

"Oh mom, you're so old-fashioned." This is a familiar fight.

"I'm not old-fashioned. I've followed every technological advance in medicine, and they've been incredible. But everything is automatic now and it's just like... we're losing control."

"We're not losing control, we've just delegated all the simple things in life to machines and computers so we can concentrate on the important stuff."

"I miss the simple things," she says quietly.

I look over to my mom, who's staring out the window at the wide open space of our property. I'm so glad my dad kept the whole thing, despite the county's attempts to buy parts of it for development. They offered him millions, but money was never an issue for our family. Everywhere we go is all hustle and bustle and throngs of people, but coming home is always like a breath of fresh air. Dad used to live in New York, so I'm guessing that was his plan when he bought the land.

Mom seems a bit more pensive than usual. I wish I knew what to say right now, but I don't know where to start. My parents always made sure that Chase and I knew how much they loved us even though they couldn't be around all the time, but they never really told us anything. If they had a fight, we didn't know about it. I suspected that things weren't always perfect, but then mom and dad would put on what I now know is a fake happy smile and go on with their days.

I know that mom and dad drink an occasional glass of wine, but never touch liquor. I know that mom has a lot of friends and dad has a lot of siblings. I know that they both grew up out east. I know that they've worked at Seattle Grace since well before Chase and I were born except for a couple years when mom was doing her fellowship in Boston. I know from Aunt Izzie that dad proposed in the middle of Sea-Tac Airport when mom got off the plane from Boston. And I know that when I sat on Santa's lap when I was five (Aunt Cristina told us from the start that Santa was a fraud, but we wrote to him anyway for extra presents), I asked for a little sister and dad was really sad afterwards.

I don't know anything about mom's parents, except that her mom was a famous surgeon and we sometimes call Dr. Webber "grandpa", but I'm pretty sure he's not actually her dad since, well, yeah. We never knew Grandpa Shepherd, either, but when Grandma Shepherd was buried next to him a few years ago, I noticed from the headstone that he passed away when dad was a kid.

They've always tried to protect us from all the bad things in life, and I know from volunteering at New York-Presbyterian that a lot of bad things can happen. I can't imagine what they must know from the thirty or forty years they've spent at the hospital. But still, we're kept in the dark about a lot of things and I think Chase and I are officially old enough to hear the whole story.

Now I'm pensive.

Mom breaks the silence. "So are you dating anyone?" I think I preferred the silence.

"Um... no. Nobody special." I'd really rather not tell her about my habit of one night stands-turned-friends with benefits. "I didn't really have time for it between school and volunteering." It's the truth, but a girl has needs.

"Yeah, I guess I've been there," she responds. If she knew what I really meant, I highly doubt she'd say that. "How's Chase?"

"He's... a serial monogamist."

"Trying to find 'the one'?" she says, in a tone more cynical than I expected to hear from her.

"In bulk."

She laughs a real laugh and I glance over at her again. I look a lot like her. My hair is more of a chocolate brown but it has the same softness to it. My eyes are darker, too, but they crinkle at the corner like hers do. I thankfully have her nose (no offense to my dad) and her build. Basically, anytime I introduce myself to someone who knows mom, I get the whole "spitting image of your mother" line. Fortunately, mom is seriously pretty, so I can safely consider it a compliment.

Chase looks more like dad. He's a bit taller and a bit broader, but he has the whole unruly black hair thing going on. He has mom's eye color, though, and the combination of dark hair and light eyes apparently makes him totally irresistible to women. It's ridiculous.

I spend the rest of the drive giving a sanitized summary of last semester to mom, and her whole melancholy thing seems to have passed by the time we pull into the hospital parking garage and stop next to dad's completely unnecessary Range Rover.

"So, what do I need to know before I walk through these doors?"

Mom thinks for a moment before shaking her head. "Everything's the same."

"Bailey's the head of general, Cristina and Izzie are co-heads of cardiothoracic, Uncle Mark is still head of plastics..." I count them off on my fingers. There are more members of this mixed-up family but they're at private practices or hospitals out-of-state.

We enter the main building and my mom returns all the greetings aimed at her while I smile awkwardly beside her. I imagine that being the child of a celebrity would be a bit like this (except with flashing cameras, of course). Whenever my mom goes anywhere medical-related, though, people practically trip over themselves.

I guess it's why she didn't want me to be a doctor. People are going to expect me to carry on where my grandmother and mother left off, like a dynasty of amazing female surgeons or something. It's a lot of pressure.

We make our way up to the surgical floor and immediately, a bunch of people I don't recognize start lining up around my mom with questions.

"Hey! Back off, leeches," shouts the authoritative voice of one Dr. Miranda Bailey. A few of the younger residents scatter.

"Bailey!" I shriek, before bear-hugging her shorter body. It's fun because she hates it.

"Julia Grey Shepherd," she starts after removing my arms from around her body. She looks me up and down. "You lookin' more and more like your mother every time I see you." After a pause, she adds, "Do yourself a favor and stay away from tequila."

"Huh?" Talk about non-sequitur. I love tequila, but I won't mention it.

"Just trust me." She looks over to the group still circling my mother. "What are you two doing here? I thought she was taking time off."

I roll my eyes. "Oh please, you of all people know what 'time off' means to surgeons. We're officially here to see people, though. Might sneak up to the gallery to watch my dad if he's in surgery."

"Yeah, he's in the OR. Yang and Stevens should be around here somewhere, though. Sloan's probably in his office." Her pager goes off and she checks it with a frown. "I have to run. Tell your mother to schedule dinner sometime."

"Later! Tell Tuck I said 'Hi!'," I yell as she rushes off. Her son is a few years older than me and seriously good-looking. And he's a pediatrician, which just makes him even hotter. He's also very, very taken, but hey, I can still admire.

I turn back to my mother, who's still having screens of charts and scans shoved in her face.

"Julia Grey Shepherd."

I don't know why everyone around here middle-names me like I've done something wrong. I turn around with a big grin on my face, though, and receive a bear-hug of my own from Uncle Mark. "Marky!"

He rolls his eyes at that. I (not so) secretly love to annoy. If only he knew what my friends call him. Actually, he'd probably love being called "Silver Fox", so I'll keep that one in my head.

"I heard you were down here so I had to see for myself. Where's your brother?"

"Sleeping. Dad took him fishing this morning."

"Ah, yeah. That kid sleeps like your mom."

I raise an eyebrow at that. "How do you know how my mom sleeps?"

He pauses, then winks and my jaw drops.

He laughs at my expression. "Whoa, relax. We spend a lot of time inside these walls... I know how everyone sleeps. Your Aunt Izzie drools."

"Oh please, you know how people sleep because you've slept with all of them. I've heard stories," I say, with my arms crossed. When I tell Izzie what Mark said about her, I'm sure she'll tell me more of his dirty little secrets.

"Hey, let's not dig up the past. I'm a one-woman man now." I was the flower girl at his wedding to Samantha, a corporate lawyer that he met on one of his sojourns to New York. They had a long-distance relationshipish thing for a year before she was hospitalized for stress and Mark went over there to drag her out to Seattle for good. "And I never slept with your mother, even when they were broken up. Your dad would've had my balls."

That piques my interest. "What do you mean by 'when they were broken up'?"

"Uhh, yeah." He rubs the back of his neck, which I know is a nervous habit of his. "It was a lifetime ago. Don't worry about it. And don't ask your parents."

"I'm twenty-one fucking years old. I think I'm mature enough to hear about this kind of stuff." Of course, flailing my arms around and stomping my feet like I am right now probably isn't making my point any clearer.

"It's not that... it's just..."

"Touchy?" I supply. Like a hundred other subjects?

He nods and ruffles my hair. "Yeah. Look kiddo, I have to run. Tell Chase I plan on taking him out for some guy bonding time."

I sigh. "Yeah, see you soon, Uncle Mark."

The main reason that I rarely came home in the past four years is that it's like mentally reverting to childhood. Everyone forgets that I (and to a lesser extent, Chase) have been living in New York, completely self-sufficient. Well, not completely, because mom and dad paid for everything, but we took care of our own health and well-being, time management and all that. Actually, I had to take care of Chase's health and well-being sometimes, but I think we did a damn good job. Still, whenever I come back here I feel like I'm a child with no idea where my place in the world is.

I scan the room for my mom without success. Apparently, she's taken off without me. With another sigh, I walk over to the surgical board. My dad's doing a corpus callosotomy in OR3.

The trip up to the galleries is a familiar one. I ignore the door that says "Authorized Personnel Only" and push my way into the room.

I get more than a few strange looks from the residents who didn't see me grow up around here. I recognize a couple attendings though, and the entire room turns to face me when I hear my full name for the third time today.

"Hey, Aunt Cris," I say sheepishly, before making my way to the seat she's cleared for me.

"What are you doing here? Where's your mom?"

I look down into the operating room. Dad's concentrating hard on a partially exposed brain so he doesn't notice the movement above. "I don't know, off do to a consult, I'm guessing."

"She owes me fifty bucks. I knew she wouldn't last a week." My Seattle family bets on everything, including who would be the first out of me and Chase to bring a boy or girl home to meet the parents. That still hasn't happened, mostly because anytime we had anyone over in high school, they were gone before my parents got home.

"Where's Aunt Izzie?"

"She's working on something. Who knows, who cares." Cristina and Izzie have a funny relationship. Apparently, they were friends, then not friends, then actual enemies before their research year when they got together and made some impressive discoveries. They decided they were better off working together than not, but their personalities are polar opposites and tend to clash so they need lots of time apart.

My phone rings and I rifle through my purse, looking for my ear piece. I put it on, and then flip open the video screen.

"Sorry, Jules, I had to do a quick consult," mom starts.

Cristina leans over, pulls the phone towards her and waves at it. "Tell your mom she owes me fifty bucks," she whispers in my other ear.

Before I get the chance, mom speaks again. "Yeah, yeah, tell Cristina she'll get her money. Are you watching your dad's surgery? I can get some breakfast from across the street and we can eat in the gallery."

I've spent most of my life around here, so eating an omelette while watching my dad cut open someone's brain isn't weird to me. "Yeah, sure." I ask Cristina if she wants anything. "And Aunt Cris wants a chocolate chip muffin."

Twenty minutes later, my mom joins us in the gallery. As though he has some kind of Meredith Grey radar, dad finally looks up and smiles at her under his mask (I can tell). I give him a wave and he winks at me (because he can't exactly wave back) before focusing his attention on his surgery again.

"Hey Mer, are you doing the surgery you consulted on? The pancreatic cancer case, right?"

"Yeah, it was. And Dr. Richardson can handle it."

Cristina looks shocked. "But it's the perfect opportunity to flex your muscles with that laparoscopic technique you've been working on. Richardson can't come close to that."

I keep my expression neutral because I know it's stupid to get pissed off about my mom backtracking on spending time with me. Being with my mom is a life-or-death situation to these people and I'll be here all summer.

She surprises me, though. "I'm taking time off, Cristina. That means no operating."

I don't stray from my well-practiced neutral face, but inner-me is jumping around excitedly.

Cristina shrugs. "Suit yourself. So, Miss Harvard... you kicked your brother's ass."

I guess that's my cue to join the conversation. "Yeah, I scored seven points higher on the MCAT." I love Chase, but I'm honestly really proud of myself. Still, it's going to be weird, being apart from him for the first time in our lives, but we'll be two hour drive or a phone call away.

"Hey, there's nothing wrong with Dartmouth," mom says defensively.

"No, but you don't go to Dartmouth when you can go to Harvard. Mind you, I didn't even apply there, but I would have gotten in if I did."

My mom shakes her head. "I didn't apply there either."

"Why not?" I ask.

"I didn't want to stay in Boston and I really liked the atmosphere at Dartmouth when I did my undergrad."

"I wanted to stay on the West Coast, but there was a specific professor I wanted to learn from at Stanford," Cristina adds.

My mom giggles and Cristina elbows her, but as usual, they don't elaborate.

Cristina gets paged and shoves the rest of her muffin in her mouth before mumbling something about getting together later. Mom and I finish our food while dad finishes his surgery and when he's done, he gets my mom's attention and points outside the OR.

Dad walks straight to my mom when he comes out of the scrub room and wraps his arms around her, giving her a quick kiss without acknowledging that I exist. This is something that happens sometimes, when they get a bit lost in each other. It's both sweet and annoying, depending on what kind of mood I'm in.

"Are you staying for that pancreatic cancer surgery?" he asks her.

"No, I told Julia I'd spend the day with her."

"But this is perfect for your-"

She stops him with a finger on his lips. "I am taking our daughter shopping and that's final," she says playfully. "I'm not going to be that person."

"You're not your mom."

Hey, look, more stuff they won't tell me about. Mom gives him a stern look before stepping out of his arms and dad finally notices me.

"Hi daddy!" I'm still in the good mood from earlier.

"Hey Junebug. Try not to buy out the whole mall, okay?"

"Yeah, yeah," I say before giving him a quick hug.

"So I'll see you girls at home. I'll try to make it back for seven-ish."

"Okay, we'll take care of dinner." Mom gives dad another quick kiss. "Seeya."

"Bye daddy!" Like I said, I seriously regress when I come home.

I'm not going to lie, I love the attention I get when I drive the Porsche, even if I'm with my mom. We make a few stops in the city before finally pulling into the long driveway on our property with eight shopping bags in the back. It's not all for me – mom bought stuff too.

She says something about some reading she has to do and goes up to her study so I look around for Chase. I find him outside, on the back porch swing with his laptop.

"Hey loser," I say by way of greeting. "We have to unload the truck and return it."

He doesn't look up. "This loser already unloaded the truck and was just waiting for you to get home so you could come with me."

I stick my tongue out at him. It doesn't matter that he isn't looking, he'll know. "Thanks, loser. I'll go tell mom."

I'm hoping she'll let me take the Porsche again, but I'm guessing it's pretty unlikely. I knock on the slightly open door and she looks up from the journal she's reading.

"Chase and I are going to go return the truck. Should we grab dinner, too?"

"Sure, get whatever you want. And no, you can't take the Porsche. The Volvo has a food warmer in the trunk."

"And that makes it so cool," I say sarcastically.

She waves dismissively before returning her attention to the journal. "You know where the keys are."

In the car on the way home from the city – we picked up Mexican food and a salad for dad – I decide to bring up what's on my mind. "Chase, have you noticed that mom and dad don't really tell us anything?"

He taps his hands on the steering wheel. "Uh... I guess. Well, we don't really know much about anything we weren't there to experience ourselves."

"Exactly. What are they hiding?"

"What makes you think they're hiding anything?" He's actually bewildered.

"Look, Uncle Mark mentioned something about mom and dad breaking up. They never told us about that. They just said they met when they started working at Seattle Grace and then mom had her fellowship and then she came back and they got married."

He throws his hands up, letting go of the wheel, but the auto-drive kicks in. "Oh my god, who cares?"

"How can you not be curious? And then when I wanted a sister when I was a kid, they got all weird."

"Well did you really think they were going to discuss fertility issues with a five-year old?"

"But then we wanted a dog, and they got all weird about that, too."

"Yeah, I remember that. Whatever, they would tell us if it was important. Don't be so nosy." He puts his hands back on the steering wheel and pays attention to driving again, effectively ending the conversation.

I can't believe he doesn't care. I drop it, though, because it's not worth fighting over right now.

I bring the food into the house and leave it in the oven on warm before joining Chase in the den. We get through a whole episode of some nineties sitcom before I hear the front door.

I pull my brother up from the overstuffed couch and go to meet my dad in the foyer. The sight that greets me is not what I expected.

He's angry. Angrier than I've ever seen him before, with his hands clenched in fists at his sides and shoulders squared towards mom, who's at the top of the stairs. I glance back at Chase, who looks as scared as I feel.

They either haven't noticed us or aren't willing to break their stares. Finally, dad opens his mouth. His voice is cold and forceful.

"How long have you known?"