Amelia and Derek Shepherd
Ugh. I love them. I adore them. They're complicated and nuanced. And despite the back and forth about who's the "better Shepherd", the truth is that they wouldn't work without the other. Hear me out.
SIblings are complicated especially when you're the only boy among four sisters. Derek tells us this in his stand alone episode (Give Peace a Chance 6x07). It was loud and crazy and he craved silence. So we as the viewer can assume that the closest person he had- aside from Mark- is his dad.
Until he dies. And when he does, Derek is twelve and he has witnessed it all. He watched him get shot. He's the one who saw his father dead. And sadly, he's not the only one who sees it all happen. His five-year-old sister was with him. She was playing with coins and shoving them in the cracks of the floorboard because she was "saving them so she could buy a town" (Superfreak, 7x03). This shapes them. It forms who they are.
The siblings who are supposed to grow up bickering, arguing, and playing together are now grieving and traumatized for life. And the grief and the trauma affects them differently. His world shifts and all he can see is wrong and right. Black and white. One way or the other. Amelia, being so young, is so confused and so lost...and alone. Her mother's grief blinds her and the fact that Amelia's personality tends to be just like her dad's causes her to just turn away from her. (Good Shepherd 15x21).
Amelia sees this and feels abandonment on both sides and turns to what will get her attention- drugs. It's an easy way out from the pain and the hurt of losing her parent and not understanding it. It's away out from the quiet because no one talks about it. Amelia says it multiple times- no one talked about their father dying everyone just shoved it down, no one helped her process it. So she never did. This little girl could never process the trauma of watching her father be murdered because no one ever helped her. And the only other person who saw this and had the same trauma...was also a kid.
Derek sees his sister's spiral and tells his mom he'll step up, he'll "watch out for her" and Carolyn (Mama Shepherd) lets him. And he does his best to hide his pain from everyone. He does that a lot. He even admits it to Amelia which is why he didn't tell her about the shooting and him getting shot. And even their mom acknowledges that it was never his job to do that but he did offer and she did let him.
So he does...but he's not great at it. Because he's still a kid and not the parent. And Amelia looks up to him as a brother not a parent. She doesn't want him to be her 'dad' she wants her brother but he can't be that because he promised his mom.
And then he goes off to med school, leaves her, and somehow, Amelia gets a hold of his prescription pad and overdoses and dies for three minutes. And to top it all off, Derek is the one who does CPR on her for the three minutes she was dead. (Superfreak, 7x03).
So his whole life, Derek's been trying to take care of Amelia and failing at it. And it's not his fault. He was a kid trying to do an adult job and then a young adult trying to find a way in the world. Who was taking care of him?
And it's not Amelia's fault either. She was a little girl trying to understand the cruelty of the world. A little girl trying to find her place amongst the cloud of grief in her family.
It all comes to a crash in a point where they are finally mending a fractured relationship but Derek spectacularly fails at being a brother the one time she really needs him to because he's clouded by his own selfishness that has been building up for years. (Can We Start Again, Please, 11x07). It's awful and unfair and unjustifiable.
And when he apologizes, it kind of clicks together. He's been trying to do the right thing for years and every time it all goes wrong- his marriages, his relationship with his sister, the D.C. dilemma, his career, etc. He's been trying to protect Amelia when she doesn't need protecting anymore and sabotaged her instead.
Amelia gets this. She understands he's at rock bottom because she's been there. It's her turn to step up for him. But she doesn't know how to. No one taught them how to. Their home life was silent.
Amelia is a glaring reminder to Derek of all his failures in life. Derek is a giant shadow that reminds her that he was able to move forward past his father's death and she couldn't. He's the Golden Boy and she's the Black Sheep.
It's why they resent each other. It's why there's fireworks every time they see each other. It's why they deserved more. So much more.
And just when they've mended their relationship. Just when it all seemed to fit between them...they're story ends with an unfinished phone call. Kind of like their sibling relationship...unfinished.
I love the Shepherd Siblings and dare I say they are far more interesting to me that the Grey's ( I know, I know the show is Grey's but still...).
