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Sometimes you felt less like a sibling and more like a parent to Max. Which took a huge toll on you, seeing that movies always showed you siblings being like life long best friends — but instead you found yourself disciplining her, fighting with her about curfew, all the while trying to be there for her and help her fight her guilt over what happened to Billy. She just wouldn’t listen to anyone telling her that it wasn’t her fault, and it ate you alive.
It built up slowly, the dark thoughts of not being enough and losing Max because of it taking you in. Whispers of your own thoughts in your ears, reminding you how bad job you were doing, driving Max away and only making it worse with every step you took.
And then the hallucinations started. Hearing and sometimes seeing an old clock ticking somewhere, in places such things shouldn’t be, but nobody else heard or saw it. Over time, you were whispered to be crazy by how scared and paranoid you became, driven insane by how brutally your brother was murdered. Maybe you were the killer yourself and did it during having some psychotic blackout, some people muttered.
So you learned to keep your visions a secret. You ignored the grandfather clock embedded between the shelves as you were shopping, the clock face at the back of the washing machine, hearing ticking even from your car radio. But the longer you tried to ignore it, the harder your dark thoughts pushed themselves on you.
Max started to act out even harder the worse your own mental health got — reacting to your mood, no doubt. Your fault again.
Max’s and Lucas’s relationship was cracking. Your fault too.
Max was distancing herself from her friends. Your fault.
One day, as you were at the front yard putting up laundry, the world seemed to disappear from around you. Birds stopped singing, you didn’t see or hear signs of life from anywhere. And then, the ticking started again.
And this time, you weren’t able to ignore it. It called to you, its pull so impossibly strong that you weren’t able to resist it. And, something in your mind told you, maybe if you knew what it was, you would get a peace of mind about it.
Oh, how wrong you were.
Lucas saw you standing at the yard first, the laundry basket on the ground, the wet clothes scattered around your feet as your eyes flickered, turning inward.
“Max!” Lucas screamed, trying to shake you. “Max, come quick!”
Mike, Dustin and Will soon followed Lucas, staring at you, puzzled what was wrong. Max ran outside just in time to see you descending above them all, as if you were possessed somehow.
They all knew immediately this was done by something related to the Upside Down, but they couldn’t do anything else but scream your name, hoping you’d snap out of it somehow, but they’d soon learn they were far, far too late.
As your body crumbled onto the ground and Max’s scream echoed through the neighborhood, only now remembering how much she loved you — and somewhere in the Upside Down, Vecna knew that was something he could use against your sister when her time would come.