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mostlysignssomeportents · 3 hours

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UK publishers suing Google for $17.4b over rigged ad markets

THIS WEEKEND (June 7–9), I'm in AMHERST, NEW YORK to keynote the 25th Annual Media Ecology Association Convention and accept the Neil Postman Award for Career Achievement in Public Intellectual Activity.

Look, no one wants to kick Big Tech to the curb more than I do, but, also: it's good that Google indexes the news so people can find it, and it's good that Facebook provides forums where people can talk about the news.

It's not news if you can't find it. It's not news if you can't talk about it. We don't call information you can't find or discuss "news" – we call it "secrets."

And yet, the most popular – and widely deployed – anti-Big Tech tactic promulgated by the news industry and supported by many of my fellow trustbusters is premised on making Big Tech pay to index the news and/or provide a forum to discuss news articles. These "news bargaining codes" (or, less charitably, "link taxes") have been mooted or introduced in the EU, France, Spain, Australia, and Canada. There are proposals to introduce these in the US (through the JCPA) and in California (the CJPA).

These US bills are probably dead on arrival, for reasons that can be easily understood by the Canadian experience with them. After Canada introduced Bill C-18 – its own news bargaining code – Meta did exactly what it had done in many other places where this had been tried: blocked all news from Facebook, Instagram, Threads, and other Meta properties.

This has been a disaster for the news industry and a disaster for Canadians' ability to discuss the news. Oh, it makes Meta look like assholes, too, but Meta is the poster child for "too big to care" and is palpably indifferent to the PR costs of this boycott.

Frustrated lawmakers are now trying to figure out what to do next. The most common proposal is to order Meta to carry the news. Canadians should be worried about this, because the next government will almost certainly be helmed by the far-right conspiratorialist culture warrior Pierre Poilievre, who will doubtless use this power to order Facebook to platform "news sites" to give prominence to Canada's rotten bushel of crypto-fascist (and openly fascist) "news" sites.

Americans should worry about this too. A Donald Trump 2028 presidency combined with a must-carry rule for news would see Trump's cabinet appointees deciding what is (and is not) news, and ordering large social media platforms to cram the Daily Caller (or, you know, the Daily Stormer) into our eyeballs.

But there's another, more fundamental reason that must-carry is incompatible with the American system: the First Amendment. The government simply can't issue a blanket legal order to platforms requiring them to carry certain speech. They can strongly encourage it. A court can order limited compelled speech (say, a retraction following a finding of libel). Under emergency conditions, the government might be able to compel the transmission of urgent messages. But there's just no way the First Amendment can be squared with a blanket, ongoing order issued by the government to communications platforms requiring them to reproduce, and make available, everything published by some collection of their favorite news outlets.

This might also be illegal in Canada, but it's harder to be definitive. The Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms was enshrined in 1982, and Canada's Supreme Court is still figuring out what it means. Section Two of the Charter enshrines a free expression right, but it's worded in less absolute terms than the First Amendment, and that's deliberate. During the debate over the wording of the Charter, Canadian scholars and policymakers specifically invoked problems with First Amendment absolutism and tried to chart a middle course between strong protections for free expression and problems with the First Amendment's brook-no-exceptions language.

So maybe Canada's Supreme Court would find a must-carry order to Meta to be a violation of the Charter, but it's hard to say for sure. The Charter is both young and ambiguous, so it's harder to be definitive about what it would say about this hypothetical. But when it comes to the US and the First Amendment, that's categorically untrue. The US Constitution is centuries older than the Canadian Charter, and the First Amendment is extremely definitive, and there are reams of precedent interpreting it. The JPCA and CJPA are totally incompatible with the US Constitution. Passing them isn't as silly as passing a law declaring that Pi equals three or that water isn't wet, but it's in the neighborhood.

But all that isn't to say that the news industry shouldn't be attacking Big Tech. Far from it. Big Tech compulsively steals from the news!

But what Big Tech steals from the news isn't content.

It's money.

Big Tech steals money from the news. Take social media: when a news outlet invests in building a subscriber base on a social media platform, they're giving that platform a stick to beat them with. The more subscribers you have on social media, the more you'll be willing to pay to reach those subscribers, and the more incentive there is for the platform to suppress the reach of your articles unless you pay to "boost" your content.

This is plainly fraudulent. When I sign up to follow a news outlet on a social media site, I'm telling the platform to show me the things the news outlet publishes. When the platform uses that subscription as the basis for a blackmail plot, holding my desire to read the news to ransom, they are breaking their implied promise to me to show me the things I asked to see:

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2023/06/save-news-we-need-end-end-web

This is stealing money from the news. It's the definition of an "unfair method of competition." Article 5 of the Federal Trade Commission Act gives the FTC the power to step in and ban this practice, and they should:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/01/10/the-courage-to-govern/#whos-in-charge

Big Tech also steals money from the news via the App Tax: the 30% rake that the mobile OS duopoly (Apple/Google) requires for every in-app purchase (Apple/Google also have policies that punish app vendors who take you to the web to make payments without paying the App Tax). 30% out of every subscriber dollar sent via an app is highway robbery! By contrast, the hyperconcentrated, price-gouging payment processing cartel charges 2-5% – about a tenth of the Big Tech tax. This is Big Tech stealing money from the news:

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2023/06/save-news-we-must-open-app-stores

Finally, Big Tech steals money by monopolizing the ad market. The Google-Meta ad duopoly takes 51% out of every ad-dollar spent. The historic share going to advertising "intermediaries" is 10-15%. In other words, Google/Meta cornered the market on ads and then tripled the bite they were taking out of publishers' advertising revenue. They even have an illegal, collusive arrangement to rig this market, codenamed "Jedi Blue":

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jedi_Blue

There's two ways to unrig the ad market, and we should do both of them.

First, we should trustbust both Google and Meta and force them to sell off parts of their advertising businesses. Currently, both Google and Meta operate a "full stack" of ad services. They have an arm that represents advertisers buying space for ads. Another arm represents publishers selling space to advertisers. A third arm operates the marketplace where these sales take place. All three arms collect fees. On top of that: Google/Meta are both publishers and advertisers, competing with their own customers!

This is as if you were in court for a divorce and you discovered that the same lawyer representing your soon-to-be ex was also representing you…while serving as the judge…and trying to match with you both on Tinder. It shouldn't surprise you if at the end of that divorce, the court ruled that the family home should go to the lawyer.

So yeah, we should break up ad-tech:

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2023/05/save-news-we-must-shatter-ad-tech

Also: we should ban surveillance advertising. Surveillance advertising gives ad-tech companies a permanent advantage over publishers. Ad-tech will always know more about readers' behavior than publishers do, because Big Tech engages in continuous, highly invasive surveillance of every internet user in the world. Surveillance ads perform a little better than "content-based ads" (ads sold based on the content of a web-page, not the behavior of the person looking at the page), but publishers will always know more about their content than ad-tech does. That means that even if content-based ads command a slightly lower price than surveillance ads, a much larger share of that payment will go to publishers:

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2023/05/save-news-we-must-ban-surveillance-advertising

Banning surveillance advertising isn't just good business, it's good politics. The potential coalition for banning surveillance ads is everyone who is harmed by commercial surveillance. That's a coalition that's orders of magnitude larger than the pool of people who merely care about fairness in the ad/news industries. It's everyone who's worried about their grandparents being brainwashed on Facebook, or their teens becoming anorexic because of Instagram. It includes people angry about deepfake porn, and people angry about Black Lives Matter protesters' identities being handed to the cops by Google (see also: Jan 6 insurrectionists).

It also includes everyone who discovers that they're paying higher prices because a vendor is using surveillance data to determine how much they'll pay – like when McDonald's raises the price of your "meal deal" on your payday, based on the assumption that you will spend more when your bank account is at its highest monthly level:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/06/05/your-price-named/#privacy-first-again

Attacking Big Tech for stealing money is much smarter than pretending that the problem is Big Tech stealing content. We want Big Tech to make the news easy to find and discuss. We just want them to stop pocketing 30 cents out of every subscriber dollar and 51 cents out of ever ad dollar, and ransoming subscribers' social media subscriptions to extort publishers.

And there's amazing news on this front: a consortium of UK web-publishers called Ad Tech Collective Action has just triumphed in a high-stakes proceeding, and can now go ahead with a suit against Google, seeking damages of GBP13.6b ($17.4b) for the rigged ad-tech market:

https://www.reuters.com/technology/17-bln-uk-adtech-lawsuit-against-google-can-go-ahead-tribunal-rules-2024-06-05/

The ruling, from the Competition Appeal Tribunal, paves the way for a frontal assault on the thing Big Tech actually steals from publishers: money, not content.

This is exactly what publishing should be doing. Targeting the method by which tech steals from the news is a benefit to all kinds of news organizations, including the independent, journalist-owned publishers that are doing the best news work today. These independents do not have the same interests as corporate news, which is dominated by hedge funds and private equity raiders, who have spent decades buying up and hollowing out news outlets, and blaming the resulting decline in readership and profits on Craiglist.

You can read more about Big Finance's raid on the news in Margot Susca's Hedged: How Private Investment Funds Helped Destroy American Newspapers and Undermine Democracy:

https://www.press.uillinois.edu/books/?id=p087561

You can also watch/listen to Adam Conover's excellent interview with Susca:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N21YfWy0-bA

Frankly, the looters and billionaires who bought and gutted our great papers are no more interested in the health of the news industry or democracy than Big Tech is. We should care about the news and the workers who produce the news, not the profits of the hedge-funds that own the news. An assault on Big Tech's monetary theft levels the playing field, making it easier for news workers and indies to compete directly with financialized news outlets and billionaire playthings, by letting indies keep more of every ad-dollar and more of every subscriber-dollar – and to reach their subscribers without paying ransom to social media.

Ending monetary theft – rather than licensing news search and discussion – is something that workers are far more interested in than their bosses. Any time you see workers and their bosses on the same side as a fight against Big Tech, you should look more closely. Bosses are not on their workers' side. If bosses get more money out of Big Tech, they will not share those gains with workers unless someone forces them to.

That's where antitrust comes in. Antitrust is designed to strike at power, and enforcers have broad authority to blunt the power of corporate juggernauts. Remember Article 5 of the FTC Act, the one that lets the FTC block "unfair methods of competition?" FTC Chair Lina Khan has proposed using it to regulate training AI, specifically to craft rules that address the labor and privacy issues with AI:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3mh8Z5pcJpg

This is an approach that can put creative workers where they belong, in a coalition with other workers, rather than with their bosses. The copyright approach to curbing AI training is beloved of the same media companies that are eagerly screwing their workers. If we manage to make copyright – a transferrable right that a worker can be forced to turn over their employer – into the system that regulates AI training, it won't stop training. It'll just trigger every entertainment company changing their boilerplate contract so that creative workers have to sign over their AI rights or be shown the door:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/05/13/spooky-action-at-a-close-up/#invisible-hand

Then those same entertainment and news companies will train AI models and try to fire most of their workers and slash the pay of the remainder using those models' output. Using copyright to regulate AI training makes changes to who gets to benefit from workers' misery, shifting some of our stolen wages from AI companies to entertainment companies. But it won't stop them from ruining our lives.

By contrast, focusing on actual labor rights – say, through an FTCA 5 rulemaking – has the potential to protect those rights from all parties, and puts us on the same side as call-center workers, train drivers, radiologists and anyone else whose wages are being targeted by AI companies and their customers.

Policy fights are a recurring monkey's paw nightmare in which we try to do something to fight corruption and bullying, only to be outmaneuvered by corrupt bullies. Making good policy is no guarantee of a good outcome, but it sure helps – and good policy starts with targeting the thing you want to fix. If we're worried that news is being financially starved by Big Tech, then we should go after the money, not the links.

If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/06/06/stealing-money-not-content/#content-free

#pluralistic #competition #advertising #surveillance advertising #saving the news from big tech #link taxes #trustbusting #competition and markets authority #uk #ukpoli #Ad Tech Collective Action #digital markets unit #Competition Appeal Tribunal

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havoc-7 · 1 day

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Why Tech's Death Maybe WASN'T Handled As Badly As We Think

Okay y'all, this is definitely gonna be a hot take but I just have to say it:

I was, and still am, DEVASTATED about Tech's death.

I want him to be alive so bad. I think he deserved so much better.

I thought it was frustrating the way that his death was handled in S3--sort of there in these small little moments, but never meaningfully acknowledged, and certainly never grappled with by the characters the way that it should be. We never see the characters really experience closure with regards to Tech's death, and so we, by extension, never experience the same closure, and we left feeling this continuing sense of bereavement and grief and anger and injustice.

HOWEVER

I think that is the way we are supposed to feel about it.

The Bad Batch is about, among other things, the dehumanizing effects and the tragic costs of war and genocide. It is about a group of people (the clones) who have to fight for basic human rights, for the right to have their own identities and to create their own futures. That is not a battle that is only fought in fiction. People fight that fight every day, all over the world.

Tech's death boiled down to this: Tech loves his brother, Crosshair. Crosshair is brainwashed and manipulated by a corrupt government who stripped him of his identity and free will and isolated him from his family. When Crosshair finally becomes disillusioned with the Empire, his usefulness to them as a soldier disappears and he becomes nothing more than a test subject for inhumane experimentation. Tech sees a chance to save Crosshair from this, but the plans go awry and now he and all his brothers face the same fate. The logical solution: sacrifice himself. Make sure they get away. Make sure they never have to go through what the Empire will put them through. Give them a chance at a future.

Tech's death never should have happened because the Empire never should have happened. What the Empire did to the clones never should have happened. The clones should never have had to fight for the right to be human beings.

Was his death incredibly noble? Absolutely. Is he a hero? Absolutely.

But in real life, a fact of war is that brave people are going to have to make profound sacrifices that, despite being noble and heroic, should never have to be made, because the fact is, we should just all be able to treat each other like human beings without having to go to war about it. And in real life, there are families who never receive 100% closure after losing loved ones, especially to war. Families are ripped apart every day and never have a chance to grieve, reconcile, come to terms. They just have to press forward.

And that has always been a major theme of Star Wars: that despite what happens, despite what we lose, the mission is just to keep going, to live to fight another day, to build a better future, to not let sacrifices go to waste. And that's what the Batch does.

Again, does that mean I'm happy with how Tech's death was handled in S3? No. I still think that his death was outrageously ignored for him being such a major character. I know that the Batch is not really supposed to reach full closure until the very end--the epilogue, really, because emotional turmoil and tension plays such a big role in S3--but if that is the case, then Tech's death certainly could have contributed to some of that turmoil and tension in a much more satisfying way, so that fans are not left thinking that the entire Bad Batch just shrugged of Tech's death and said, "Eh, great, he sacrificed himself for us, his choice, he knew the risks, so let's just move on." If they were as close a family as the show wants us to think, then Tech's death would have been a shadow over them every single day for a long time, and the last season just never really gives us that, at least not in the way we need. It could have afforded to be much more open about Tech's death.

However, the lingering feelings of grief that we fans feel because Tech died may be a good thing, because they show that we are human, and they show that we recognize the wrongness and injustice of it all. They show that we have not become desensitized to sacrifice. And, in light of all the themes and messages the show tries to portray, I think that might be the point.

Tech represents all of the real people, all over the world, who heroically died fighting fights that never should have had to be fought.

#sw tbb #star wars #tbb #the bad batch #sw the bad batch #tbb crosshair #tbb tech #tbb hunter #tbb wrecker

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finniestoncrane · 3 days

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KTJL!Boomer x Fem!Reader, word count: 1k giveaway commission: thank you sweet and precious @creepling for my first foray into a sex pollen style fic, and the perfect subject for it! waller has synthesised a replica of some brainiac serum that encourages procreation, and since george literally will take any excuse for a good root, he and reader are the test subjects 💙 request info • prompt list • send me a request • kofi • masterlist minors DNI!! 🔞 cw: sex pollen-esque, dubcon elements, overstimulation, breeding kink, exhibitionism

"Send her in."

"Ms Waller, have you really considered the ethical implications of-"

"Do you want to go in there?"

"N-no."

"Well then, send. Her. In."

Only three days since Hack had discovered documentation of a serum in Brainiac's logs that encouraged repetitive breeding amongst subjects, with successful procreation leading to the optimal genetic conditions being chosen from both parents for the offspring. And in that three days, Waller had gained permission from the government for ARGUS to implement a test of the synthesised serum.

They had so many more fights ahead of them, and she didn't consider herself to be working with the best team. However, she could at least admit that amidst all the negative traits, there were some positives. But the risk was still there, so she wasn't about to select the top for the experiment.

Which is why she had settled on George Harkness. If anything went wrong, she wouldn't feel bad losing him. And for his partner, a random inmate. No discernible talents, so to speak, at least not in a way that would be effective against meta humans or alien hoards. But someone who was of sound-ish mind and could offer a sense of stability to whatever George was offering.

That's where you came in.

All they had to do was mentioned a reduced sentence and you had agreed. Truthfully, when they had been explaining it to you in the medical checks, you had only focused on the concept of finally, after months of no physical contact, having sex, at last.

Something that your partner was equally excited about.

In the room beyond the door where you were being kept, George was standing against the wall, rutting into it, his stiff cock bashed against the surface in a bid to find any kind of friction. He'd been given the serum five minutes before, and the effects were almost instantaneous.

The serum had been injected into you moments before they led you down the corridor, so you were slightly behind him in terms of your side effects. That meant you were vaguely shocked when you were shoved into the room, the door locked behind you, and you found George humping the air as he turned to you.

"Hello, Sheila! What's a pretty girl like you doing in a place like this then?"

His grin was wide, pushing into his cheeks, the creases in his face deep as he winked and narrowed his eyes. Usually, that kind of blatant, and poor, attempt at flirting would have put you off, but the serum had begun to work through you. That, and you had to admit that you definitely found him attractive.

George lifted his shirt off as he walked towards you, flexing his muscles and tensing them, showing off like a peacock. It was effective, as you felt your own stomach tighten, warmth spreading through your core as you took in the sight of him, fit, sturdy, oddly charming.

"Hot in here, ain't it, babe?"

As he took off his signature beanie, tossing it to the floor, he shook his hair out, the sweat that had begun to bead on his forehead falling onto the floor with the movement. Meeting him in the middle of the floor, you pressed your hands to his torso. A move that was far more forward than one you were likely to make under normal circumstances, but you were practically growling, desperate to feel his body, aching for him to be as close to you as possible. Your cunt clenched, longing for something to fill it, and George was right there, willing and eager.

"Fuck me."

"You not gonna ask me out to dinner first, babe?"

"I don't know how much time we have before the serum wears off... do you really want to risk it?"

He smiled wide, licking at his lips and waggling his tongue at you before putting it back in his mouth.

"Yeah, fair point well made, love. You know me, any excuse."

With complete abandon to any of your senses or social norms, you let your pants fall to the ground, stepping out of them and falling to the floor. Maneuvering yourself onto your hands and knees, you reached behind to spread yourself open for him.

"Where do you want it then, babe?"

You looked to him with a questioning gaze. From her position behind the two-way glass, Amanda rolled her eyes, unable to comprehend his stupidity.

"Oh right! The... the thing..."

Quickly, and with very little care for any foreplay, George ran a finger down your slit, spreading your slit over your cunt before he pushed his cock deep within your walls, beginning to fuck you at an energetic and frantic pace.

"Fuck me, babe... they'll have to get a team of men to pull me out of you."

"They're... not gonna... hng... pull you out, George... that's the point..."

His eyes widened as he realised, rutting into you more frantically at the excitement of cumming inside of you, painting your insides, his seed there for a purpose.

"Oh, yeah! Well, I've already made one... might as well give it another go!"

As he neared his orgasm, his words became cruder, alluding to the act in a way that was so lewd you could feel yourself getting wetter and warmer with each statement.

"... fill you up... get it right up there in you... no chance you're leaving here empty... tied to me always, eh?"

With what you could only describe as a howl, you felt his body tense and shudder, one last final, deep thrust into you as you were filled with his warm, thick seed.

He kept rutting, a sticky mess against his abdomen and your rear, coating his dick, your slick and his cum combined as he kept pushing himself forward. His cock was softening, but he refused to move from you, and only when you collapsed onto your stomach was his length released.

George's cum was still spilling out of you, so much of it even after he had spent an extra minute pumping it deep inside of you, ensuring that you would definitely be in receipt of his significant contributions towards Waller's future line of controllable, successful squad members.

And as you felt yourself finding the energy to ask for a second round, you turned to find George still rutting, his hips jerking into the air, clearly ready to go again, too.

#captain boomerang #digger harkness #george harkness #captain boomerang x reader #captain boomer x you #captain boomerang fanfic #finnie writes

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hitlikehammers · 2 days

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if you can’t write your own necronomicon, store-bought is fine 🪦

(not ideal but: fine) — 1/3

for @klausinamarink, who prompted 'NECROMANCY' at the @steddiesummerexchange

Steve wants this clear, on-the-record, absolutely fucking crystal, okay?

It was not his intention to snoop through Eddie’s shit.

It’s not even a ‘respect for the dead’ thing. It’s just a ‘be a decent dude and don’t go through another dude’s personal stuff’ thing.

So like. Just to be clear.

It does not start out the way it…ends up.

——————

How it does start out is this notion that gets stuck in Steve’s head about the fucking gravestone they’re putting up. He hates the idea of it being installed over nothing, just plopped atop grass and dirt and just, just…nothing.

Almost like they’re saying Eddie was somehow nothing, and when the overall notion hits on that thought specifically Steve has this simultaneous urge to break a window and vomit, and it’s just, it’s not—

He needs to find a way to curb that feeling.

He hates it enough to mention it to the others, who don’t get it. At all. Maybe because it’s Steve, and they don’t think he knew Eddie enough to be this…this. Maybe because it’s Steve and that’s not Steve’s role, is it? Having the feelings. And if Steve was in a clearer frame of mind, maybe he’d be able to wonder if the people he’s asking just can’t handle what he’s asking, can’t process more of…any of it, not right now.

But he’s not. In a clearer frame of mind. He can’t process, either, beyond the kind of fucking all-consuming need to not bury nothing under Eddie Munson’s name.

So he buys a casket. Anonymously, uses his dad’s business card. Ships it to the place he knows is doing the stone, there’s really only one option in town and maybe they’ll be confused, or maybe they’ll be pissed, but Steve makes sure when it arrives that it sits on their doorstep, moves it in the night when it gets dropped after hours: unavoidable. Unignorable. Black on the outside and red on the inside, but Steve moves it all by himself and it’s still too light. It’s still empty. It’s not quite nothing.

But fuck if it’s enough.

The only two people he’s tried to broach the subject with—or who’ve heard him in the process—and who haven’t brushed him off are Robin, and that’s because she’s his soulmate, and they haven’t slept without one another in arm’s-reach at the absolute most since they lost—

Well. Since.

The second person is Eleven, and she’d just overheard Mike scoffing and Dustin blinking silently, and Steve had known when to leave a battle that couldn’t be won because it wasn’t even gonna be fought, but he had caught her with a crease between her eyes. Her face scrunched all thoughtful. Listening.

And if nothing else: not dismissing.

So when the idea strikes—not manic, it’s not a manic sort of idea, maybe it’s close, like in the ballpark of manic but hotdogs and millionaires are also in the same ballpark at the same time, y’know, and they’re nothing alike so fuck you—but when the not-manic idea strikes to put something, something that means something, that carries literal and figurative weight, inside that casket?

He tells Robin, who looks at him with sadness but not with pity, and who asks how they’ll manage it, rather than trying to talk him out of it. He’ll never get over how lucky he is to have her; never learn words that live up to how much she means to him.

But also: it’s good that all she does is ask how. Because Steve actually has that figured out.

He heads to Hop’s cabin when he knows both he and Joyce are gone. He explains in simple but plain terms, the kind he’s learning El appreciates best and processes easiest, especially when feelings are involved. And these feelings she grasps without hesitation, and fills in Steve’s vague ideas with concrete plans, and it takes less than twelve hours to see them at Forest Hills, where the government still hasn’t moved that goddamn trailer to give anyone any semblance of closure but definitely finds the time and manpower to put up new tape around the scene whenever it’s tampered with, fuck those motherfuckers all over again and—

Right. Well.

It takes less than twelve hours for El to distract the guards with a very minor fire on the other end of the park and some suspicious-sounding chittering she bets right on piquing their attention, giving Steve and Robin the in to sneak around the barriers and find their quarry: the version of the Warlock that never saw the Upside Down, knocked to the floor but in one piece. Weighty.

Something that means something, to mourn in the ground.

Robin’s peeking out the window, checking if the coast is clear for them to jet, for Eleven to ease off and meet them back at Steve’s car to go back to their evenings like nothing ever happened, save for the guitar in Steve’s trunk and at her signal Steve makes to follow with said guitar slung awkward across his back but then something…something pulls in him. It’s not even a catch from the corner of his eye or some shit, no, he feels it in the center of his chest:

What if it’s not enough?

So he grabs as many of the books scattered on the floor around a cracked and quaked-apart shelf in the corner as he can fit between both arms, all sorts and shapes and sizes, and then he’s ignoring Robin’s raised brow and crawling as quiet as he can back out of the trailer, out of the half crime scene, half quarantine zone, and running for the trees to get back to where they parked.

El’s waiting for them, and as he drives, honestly?

Steve thought he’d feel better about things, now. He thought this would start to calm that nauseous rage in him.

Maybe once it’s in the casket. Maybe once he feels the heft of it as a real thing.

Maybe.

——————

It would probably be logical to think that it’s the weight of the guitar that makes the shift, that turns the tides.

But that’d actually be a goddamn stupid thought because nothing about any of this—this town, what lies beneath it, the war they’re fighting the battle they lost, Steves fucking life now at large—none of it is logical, Jesus Christ. The guitar. What a fucking dumb idea.

Because it’s the books, of course.

It’s the goddamn books.

Because the guitar helps but it’s not enough. Steve tried his fucking hardest to lift Eddie’s body, had him in his arms but the gates were closing, the rope half-assed at too short after he’d cut Dustin off and with all of their wounds even Robin and Nancy—both with more upper body strength then you’d think—were basically fish in a fucking barrel and Steve was in worse shape but fuck if he didn’t get them out, get everyone out but—

He’d been the last, with Eddie. He’d felt the heft of that body, too cool against his chest but not cold, not yet—not dead weight, not dead weight, he was a person, he was this incredible person Steve was only just getting to know and he was, now he was—

No one had been unscathed to the point of being able to help Steve up. Steve had had the kind of shocking sort of clarity for being ready to stay with Eddie as the gate sizzled and narrowed, no man fucking left behind, right, but for the screaming growing ever more shrill for each failed attempt Steve made at holding Eddie different, at trying to get up and over the threshold together to no avail: he made the call the rest of them were screaming of him to make, despite the messiest fucking tears:

Leave him. He’s already gone. You’re not.

He knew how much Eddie weighed to carry, is the point. And the man was a lanky fucker with a little more build to him than first glance gave away but still: the guitar does barely half the work of filling the void.

Though the exact void Steve’s trying to fill might be…it might be more complicated than just the fucking casket not being empty.

But the casket does need more than just the instrument.

He sorts through the books he grabbed blindly; they all must at least be ones Eddie liked but…The Lord of the Rings. There are three of those, right? I feel like there are at least the three, and there are three right here that look so well loved they can’t not have meaning; Steve wanted to read them. He won’t be quick enough to read these copies, though, and that does feel like such a fucking loss, and that’s the point, isn’t it?

The grave can’t be empty. It can’t be meaningless. The marker’s meant to bear the loss.

They’re big, like, thick fucking books—one of about a hundred reasons why Steve hadn’t picked them up before. And no, he’s not…he’s not going to dwell on the why behind the way he lets his fingers flip the pages slow, stop here and there and drag the nail-tip across a line, a paragraph, wondering what some of the words mean, what Eddie would have thought of them, if he were here to ask—

There needs to be more weight. He shoves the trilogy to the side and grabs for…oh.

Oh, these are the…manual. Thingies.

For the dragon dungeons.

He lifts one, tests it: not as heavy. But there…there are a lot, and—

And Steve’s opening them too, flipping slow just the same: wondering. Wishing he could have a running commentary alongside that boundless energy even in the face of the end of the world, maybe because of the impending doom of the end of the goddamn world and Steve, walking shoulder to shoulder with him in those fucking death woods, he, it was, they—

“He was right,” Steve remarks, and realizes belatedly that it’s the first words he’s said to Robin where she’s flicking through a stack of books much quicker than him, clinical: all about the weight for the casket but Steve’s stuck on a page that takes him back to a conversation he heard only half of, the kids trying to catch Eddie up, trying to describe what they all call demogorgons and Eddie muttering under his breath about how that sounded absolutely fucking not like a demogorgon, and there a drawing right here, black and white and:

“They look nothing like they do in the game.”

Robin meets his gaze and still—somehow—her eyes are sad but they don’t pity him. Not yet, at least.

He’ll take it.

“Nothing in these is even really, like, connected,” Steve mumbles as he flips, flinches at the marked up pages on Vecna, Jesus fuck; “or workable,” he looks at the Mind Flayer and cringes, feels the urge to hide those pages from Robin even if she isn’t close, then decides to play it safe for probably irrational reasons and tosses the book to the side and grabs blindly for another one, oh cool, this looks like…spells and shit: “like, none of this looks apple,” Steve bites his lower lip, the word he’s looking for a little fuzzy when he’s scanning over the words on the page, because they’re, they’re not; “not even applicable, y’know, in reality,” but that’s vague, they’ve set foot in more than one reality, so does that even count as a caveat anymore but then, but then—and what they fuck is his heart pounding all of a sudden, he’s just sitting down, that’s not; but then;

“Or else, not for the Upside…”

His voice gives, peters out. His pulse is thick in his throat. He’s staring so hard at nonsense, at fantasy, at, at useless pretend things that won’t change anything, won’t fucking help, and why does it all hurt in his chest so fucking much and—

“Right?”

He looks up and Rob’s already got eyes on him. He can’t imagine how he looks. His vision’s a little…blurry, and it doesn’t even feel like it’s from tears, which…it does feel like it should be—but she might have crossed over to watching him with pity, now. He wouldn’t be able to tell.

But either way: Robin knows him, down to the cells. She knows the question he speaks out loud isn’t the question he’s asking. He’s not asking for reassurance, or confirmation. He’s not even asking her an opinion. He’s sure as shit not asking for permission.

Because he’s dizzy. His heart’s pounding, and he’s fucking dizzy, and it’s nonsense, it’s not real, it’s all a stupid game and the names don’t even match—

But. All of it was real. In some way, it was real.

It’s not an exact science, not a perfect match: it never was. But that wasn’t the point. It was a roadmap. It was a way to process the unfathomable enough to get from point A to point B.

And looking at the words on the page where his fingertip is drawing a long below: he can’t…not wonder. And if he’s already set on wondering, then fuck, fuck—the rage in his chest is easy, his heart doesn’t feel so squished and his might not sick up his lunch for the first time after trying to eat more than a peanut butter sandwich from the community hub. There’s something in this. It’s what he’s been searching for. He reads the words again, again, and again and yeah, they’re absurd, they’re absolutely insane:

RAISE DEAD

But maybe…maybe they’re a roadmap. Inexact but…but up to the task. What if.

They can’t not…try.

Steve will not live with himself if they don’t try.

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