Chapter Text
There is a ruler in Glam’s office.
It is laid out on top of his desk, crisply numbered wood against wood. Glam considers it as he enters the office, and places it in a drawer next to the pink glittery plastic straight-edge he owns and rarely takes out. There are few other things inside- some erasers, a pencil sharpener, a stack of extra manuscript paper for when he runs out. He never does.
The door is locked when he isn’t there, and it is needless to say that it wasn’t there when he was last in the office. Glam walks over to the door, swings it open, and bends down to check for signs of forced entry. But of course, there are none.
He closes the door, locks it, and heads over to Dee’s room with a smile placed on his face. Three knocks, politely rapped against the solid wood of the door.
“Come in,” A tired sound greets him, and Glam swings it open. He stands perfectly silhouetted within the doorframe.
“Hello, Dee. Have you been in my office recently?” A tilt of the head, dangerous.
“No, I haven’t. The last time I was in your office was when I asked you to learn guitar.” Dee still sounds more upset than he should be, though Glam can’t quite put his finger on why.
“O-kay!” Glam chirps, and closes the door.
There is another ruler on his desk when he returns. Glam stares at it, the smile still fixed, locks the door. Then he puts that into the drawer as well. It’s stacked on top of the first and lined up against the corner. Then he checks the room. First he carefully dusts his hand over the items of furniture to feel for threads and attached items, then he removes, opens, and replaces the books on his shelf one by one. Next come the trophies, which go for a quick polish after he has removed them, the picture frames, the wastepaper bin, and finally the guitars.
Afterward he fetches a stool from the storage room and disassembles the boomboxes, clock, and electric piano, and violin display case. He washes his hands, and checks all of them again. He locks the drawer, then the room when he exits, and returns thirty-seven minutes later to a third sitting on his desk. It is a familiar writing instrument, though newer than he remembers. When he opens the drawer the stack of rulers within is disturbed and he finds a fourth on top of the first two. He smiles, wide.
Glam checks the items in the room with no disturbance, then sets up a hidden camera in one of the boomboxes, another in the display case, and a microphone in the front drawer. He sits down to work.
The sound of the doorknob being tried takes him out of his thoughts. When Vicky finds it locked, she puts her shoulder against the door to test the doorframe. “Glam! Dinner!”
“I’ll be right there, darling!” Glam responds hastily so she will not break down the door again. He has gotten no work done, and he is rushing so he does not lock the door.
Dinner is lovely, if a little too focused on meat. Glam slices his medium-rare steak and makes a mental note to cook more vegetables tomorrow, maybe locate some fish for sushi as protein.
“Oh! Has anyone been invited in the house lately?” He inquires pleasantly. Dee stares at Glam, suspicious as he beams. But they were both too good at lying to each other.
“No, I don’t think so,” Vicky says, frowning. It’s not a usual course of questioning for Glam, but she is soon distracted when Dee smacks his brother who starts giggling.
“He wishes,” Heavy says with a laugh, elbowing Dee in the ribs. Dee snarls back, something about “She is not my girlfriend! And stop hanging out with her!”
So that is a no, not since Heavy’s birthday party that everyone except Lif ignored because of the missing children.
“Oh, okay!” Glam says, brightly. He watches in slow motion as Dee takes a fork and smacks Heavy in the wrist before Vicky intervenes and drags the children apart, one in each hand. There’s a faint ringing in his ears. It leaves no marks, he knows- the sound wasn’t hard enough for one, and the children do not fight each other seriously. He eats mechanically through dinner.
When he goes back to his office the lights are on, but there is no extra ruler. When watching back on the security feeds it looks like Glam never turned off the lights in the first place. The audio is a bust, though he thinks he hears the faintest strains of Mozart. He rewinds, but there is nothing.
Back in the living area, Dee is drafting some sort of complicated blueprint. The lines are precise, graphite against lined paper, and he is using a ruler. It is not his- Dee’s are a soft black plastic, carefully lined. “Ah, Dee. Did you get new writing supplies?” It seems unlikely. The pencil is old, and there is no packaging in any of the trash cans.
“No, I found this on my table. Mom must have thought it was mine,” Dee responds, picking up on the line of inquiry. For a moment Glam thinks he sees red on the paper. His right hand twitches by his side and Dee looks to it dispassionately. There’s a flicker of suspicion on his son’s face again- he knows something’s up, but not exactly what.
“Alright! Let me know if you want any help!” Glam chirps again, and leaves to check on Heavy. His smile is as wide as ever, exposing gums. It does not occur to him that it has not dropped since a little after he saw the first ruler.
“Sure, Dad,” Dee says, and resumes drawing.
Heavy, uncharacteristically, is doing schoolwork. For an art class, to be fair, but it is schoolwork all the same. He stares forward at the screen of his laptop, drawing with his tongue sticking out of his mouth. He is using a ruler.
“What are you doing?” Glam asks, smiling harder. He feels something strange in himself and does not dwell on it.
“Oh, drawing. I’m supposed to draw the front of the school,” Heavy says, pressing hard as he looks up. The pencil snaps.
“Hmm, most people don’t use rulers to get straight lines when drawing. I can show you!” “Sure,” Heavy says, frowning heavily as he puts the pencil into the sharpener again. Glam walks over and takes a used notebook from the shelf, plucking a pencil out of the drawer of his writing desk.
Glam flips to an empty page, puts it down on the table, and presses lightly with the pencil as he bends to reach the desk. It is awkward, but workable.“Here- you keep your wrist still, and move your shoulder, arm, and elbow in the direction you are trying to draw. If you do it fast enough, you can get a very straight line!” Heavy jerks his arm, sending the pencil flying, and makes an apologetic face as it hits the wall opposite. Glam picks his way to the other side of the table, retrieves the broken pencil, and tosses into the trash can. Such a large impact must have shattered all of the lead.
“Gently,” He advises, picking up Heavy’s hand and placing it on the paper. He gives his son another pencil, then puts one hand on his wrist and the other on his elbow, and pushes. “Like that.” It works out okay, albeit a little wobbly. Heavy grunts in annoyance, pushing across the paper again a little too hard. Glam does it a few more times until Heavy learns to do it with help, then lets go. “There! Now try again!” It works relatively acceptably, so he doesn’t feel like he needs to point out the deficiencies. It is obvious to both of them that Heavy has no talent in drawing, and he’s doing it for the assignment credit anyway. “Now, if you want to make a curve, you can put your hand above the paper and move your wrist, or your elbow.”
Heavy looks confused, so Glam moves on. He likes Heavy for that- knowing when to stop when he is no good at something. “Though you should not do it, it will only confuse you.”
His son accepts the answer. Glam takes a new piece of paper and does a quick sketch of the picture Heavy had been referencing- just the guiding lines, skimming the paper with the pencil to make rough shapes where everything should be. “See, everything is either a sharp edge- so a straight line- or a curve. If you figure out the distances, then you can draw anything.”
Heavy nods and begins to draw, brows furrowed. He does not notice that Glam leaves with the ruler.
In the kitchen, Glam gets a glass of lukewarm water with his pills. The water splashes oddly when it hits the glass and a drop of it makes contact with bare skin between the loops of cloth wrapped loosely around his right forearm. He hisses reflexively, hand shaking as he holds the glass in place. It overfills by a little, and the wetness hitting his hand has him blinking and turning off the faucet.
He does a little work, then goes to bed after a quick shower. One of the better things about his childhood is that at least the scars it left were straight, and the house was clean- infection and raised scarring were undesirable for a scion of his family, and when they were at risk of taking him out of commission he received medical care. Father tended to move to the other arm, when that happened- but it rarely did. Children can live through much.
Twenty-something years have reduced the canvas of Glam’s scars to a lighter patch across the right forearm. Looking closely it spikes outward, individual strikes memorialized on his skin that have stretched with his growing bones since leaving his home at a young age. Like everything else below the wraps they are pale and rarely see the sun.
Glam considers his arm. It throbs with cutting pain, but he has learned to ignore it through years of practice. The doctors have found nothing wrong with it, in the times he has gone. By all accounts, he has healed well and there should be no issue. So he acts as if it is no issue. He clicks the light off after brushing his teeth. In the half-dark the toothbrushes look a different shape.
Vicky curls around him when he comes to bed, taking most of the bed as she usually does. She mumbles vaguely into his shoulder as he loops an arm around her shoulder, and Glam feels an enormous swell of affection. There will be something in the morning, he knows, but just for right now, all is well.