Requiem [COMPLETED]

My celebrity crush wouldn't treat me like this

"That's pretty much it," Sven said wrapping up his explanation of the night he went missing and I found him under the bridge. His posture was slouching as far away as possible, his arms crossed tightly across his chest. I was his mirror image sitting adjacent while Pastor Dave sat in his wingback chair, corralled in his office. I'd begrudgingly come at Sven's persuading to start talking about some of our fights and things that had happened since we'd come to Fargo. I didn't see why we couldn't just go to the counseling center.

"Those are mostly my teachers," Sven had said. "Over my dead body. And you know I won't talk if I don't trust someone, anyhow." It just felt like another barb, that he needed a pastor to be able to tell his own sister something that by rights I already should have known. He didn't even give me a choice of what to talk about, starting in on that night which in retrospect was the trough of his alcoholic bingeing.

Pastor David's mundane appearance didn't make me any more inclined to trust him. He'd nodded along, sympathetically and actively listening to Sven's exact-dialogue recall of his dream, or hallucination, of seeing grandpa and confronting him before passing out under the bridge. Sven never told me what his dreams were; his imagined dialogue with grandpa was at face value a perfect recreation of grandpa's favorite style of talking when angry, Biblical sounding even when we wasn't directly quoting something. The confrontation had seemed too simple, too straightforward; grandpa and he had always talked around things, never directly accusing each other of why they had pent up anger, always making it something of the moment when really they'd both been finding reasons to despise each other for as long as I could recall. Pastor David didn't let on if he was judging though; I assumed it would come out sooner or later in conversation anyway.

David asked him yet another leading question. "And so you were feeling helpless, overwhelmed, and started to despair that night that everything seemed so stacked against you?"

"Well, yeah." I wasn't prepared to see the vulnerable look on Sven's face. "I'd run out of ideas. I was feeling pretty worthless."

"Was that why you'd been drinking so much at that time?"

Sven couldn't meet our eyes. "Yeah. I know it's stupid. I just...I'm not good with feelings. It was the easiest way to not think so damned much."

"Why didn't you talk to me then?" I demanded.

"You never believed me. Why tell you just to be treated like a liar again?"

"You could have told me about the other stuff, about your sexuality, about Charlie. It doesn't make a difference. I don't know why you wouldn't tell me when I'd figured it out already."

He was clenching his hands together, leaning on his knees. "You never understand."

"You never give me the chance to."

"Sigrid," David broke in, "How did you feel when you realized Sven hadn't made it home?"

"I knew something awful might have happened."

"How did that make you feel?"

"Scared."

"Why?"

"Why do you think?" I hated him already, talking to me so simply like a child.

"I'm not trying to upset you; it's just sometimes things that are obvious to us—what feelings and thoughts motivate us—aren't interpreted by others the same way. So I know it seems silly, but spell it out for us. It's just an exercise."

"If it's just practice why is it important then?"

"I told you she wouldn't cooperate," Sven muttered. "She doesn't give a shit."