A/N: I really can’t answer for the weird forms my obsessions take. I saw the old “Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory” for the first time last week… and for some reason it struck me just the right way. There is a lovely ambiguity and confusingness about the morals of that movie and the nature of Willy Wonka that I adore… I hadn’t been expecting to find it there, but there it was. The way Roald Dahl wrote him, Willy Wonka seems colorless to me: the mouthpiece of Dahl’s utterly screwy worldviews and morals, but totally blameless, featureless, and colorless as a person and character. I walked the mile and a half to my local bookstore one steamy afternoon a few days ago to reread it and make sure I hadn’t missed something… If I did, I’m still missing it.

But that movie… I think I must go about tracking down things with Gene Wilder in them. A more diabolically evil, manipulative, immoral, amoral, moral, charming, sweet and lovable performance by anyone, I have never seen, ever. I don’t think I would previously have believed the combination possible, either. Beautifully and oddly sophisticated, wonderful, wonderful movie.

So, as far to as which canon of Chocolate Factory storylines my loyalties go… I think I’ve made that pretty clear. I’ve taken bits from the two novels, but wherever the plot of the Gene Wilder movie departs, I generally follow… honestly, it’s decisions are usually way better anyway.

As to that new Johnny Depp thing… well, we’ll see.

Aaaaand, here ya go.

Oh—the “Zoom” thing (you’ll see it)—originally that was just a whimsical scene break serving as placeholder for something a little more traditional (you know how ff.n eats scene breaks)… then I decided, possibly in a fit of insanity, that I liked it.

Charlie was fifteen the first time he sat down on the stone ledge of the great iron fence that ringed the factory and leaned his head against the bars so that the pressure left vertical red lines across the sides of his forehead. There wasn’t any particular reason for it, at least, no particular reason that it should happen on that particular day, in that particular manner, except that it was his day off, but those weren’t so rare that that fact should be exceptional. He had only been wandering—the factory really was a lovely place to wander, on a good day, (if you knew how to avoid the snozzwangers and the rest of them) but somehow the capacity of Mr. Wonka’s ever-surprising labyrinth of confectionary mysteries to make every day a good one had faded just a little over the years, and this was not one of the good days. Nothing was really wrong, of course. Charlie felt a little guilty, in fact, for being less than completely happy—had he forgotten already what it was like to be starving and freezing, in one room, with no future ahead of him, and his family withering slowly with age and poverty and hopelessness? Surely if he always kept that in mind, he should be happy all the time here, and if he was not happy here, did that mean he was dissatisfied with what should have been the most wonderful place on earth, and developing that greed that Mr. Wonka so despised?

But Charlie was bored and restless, and it was boredom and restlessness that brought him out into the bleak front yard to stare into the street. It had been a long time since he had smelled snow and cars and city things instead of sugar and chocolate. Not that Mr. Wonka wouldn’t stoop to manufacturing those smells artificially some time, if he ever thought of it, but it wouldn’t be quite the same, and it was a little startling to Charlie to find in himself a small but sharp and a little bit righteous preference for the real thing rather than the fruits of Mr. Wonka’s cleverness. Charlie examined the houses across the way, but they didn’t look very familiar: as a child he had always been looking towards the factory when he walked down that street, and the opposite side was almost new to him. When was the last time he had been outside the gates? There had been some effort in the beginning of his stay at the factory to send him to his usual school, but the press and the students and just about everyone else he met closed in like murders of carrion crows wherever he went, ever cawing questions about Wonka and the factory that he couldn’t answer—in the end it was simpler to school him where he was. There had been times he had gone out after that, once or twice. The city had been his home for ten years, after all, though it had never been a kind one, and he had tried to make his knowledge of it useful to Mr. Wonka by running errands a few times. But Mr. Wonka didn’t need things from the city—all that he needed came on big trucks from far away, and though he might have been grateful for the spirit in which Charlie meant the errands, they were mostly materially useless, and soon ended in favor of the more useful assistance Charlie could offer deep within the factory.

So it had been years since Charlie had been outside the gates. He thought of going now—but it was late, and cold, and flakes of snow were settling softly on his eyebrows and the cuffs of his coat—he reminded himself to be grateful that he had that coat, but it didn’t cure the restlessness, or the cold. He looked up at the fence, but the bars were straight and close together, and impossible to climb, now or ever, the way Mr. Willy Wonka liked it. And he could have asked Mr. Wonka for the key, but he didn’t want the fuss of explanation, and he didn’t want to show what he felt, whatever it was. He turned to go inside.

Mr. Wonka was standing motionless a little way along the fence with his back against one of the stone pillars, obscuring himself from the view of all but the nosiest passersby, with his face shadowed, but Charlie knew he had been watching him. The snow was beginning to stick on the cobblestones of the courtyard, and clung to Mr. Wonka’s hat and coat like an over-liberal dusting of powdered sugar. As Charlie looked at him, he shook himself and inclined his head with a gallant tip of his hat and twirl of his cane, and approached, with his usual bright, swinging walk. Still, standing against the white, competing with the yellow lamplight, and doubtless damp from the precipitation, his purple velvet coat looked black and unexceptional, and somehow being outside of his factory and the domains of his omnipotent control, he seemed smaller, and Charlie was shocked to stand and realize for the first time that the little man that had towered over him a few years ago stood at his own eye level.

“How much like sugar the snow looks, and yet there is a randomness to snowflakes that makes them form these odd towers, great shining fairy cathedrals that our clumsy, cumbersome hands would demolish with a single touch—” Mr. Wonka raised one dampened glove to his eyes to watch how the snowflakes stacked themselves in strange, feathery formations. “It must be the structures of the crystals that allows that, if I could make sugar crystals so complex, how beautiful they would be…”

“But it smells like snow,” said Charlie, a little brusquely, expressing his misgivings about the artificiality of it as cryptically as possible. He had learned crypticness from a master, but the master did not catch his meaning.

Mr. Wonka’s eyes widened and caught the sparks of the lamplight. His fingers flicked and flickered a little, for no purpose other than high spirits, tumbling snowflake towers onto one another and letting fall a few, like airy silver dust, and with them, his unaccustomed subdued air. “Brilliant, Charlie! Fantabulous and Brilliant! What could be better on a hot day than to open a package and smell snow, real wintertime snow, and to see it there in its crystalline glory! One could shake it onto one’s tongue and it would melt there, just like catching real snowflakes—he tilted back his head and did so a moment, then turned back to his glove again with rising excitement. “They would be perpetually cold, of course—could double as ice-packs for summer scrapes and scratches! Of course they wouldn’t taste like snow, that wouldn’t be so exciting… what should they taste like… let me see… Charlie?” Charlie had sat back down on the stone ledge and with his head tilted to lean against the bars, looking up with one eye. Mr. Wonka caught Charlie’s look and stopped, both the chatter and the little, lively motions that seemed as constant and necessary to him as his heartbeat. He breathed across his glove whose fingers had suddenly stilled to turn the crystal towers into patches of damp, and then sat down, folding himself until his chin rested on his thin knees. “Charlie?”

Charlie sat forward and tried to think how to explain, but he had no words for it. He frowned into Willy Wonka’s bright, apprehensive blue eyes, willing him to understand, but for all his magic, Willy Wonka was not psychic, and did not understand.

“I’m sorry, Mr. Wonka,” said Charlie, and he rose and went inside.

Zoom.

Charlie was sixteen the day that he first thought about Oompa Loompas.

It must have been because of what his mother had done, and something Mr. Wonka had said, and something he had read, and maybe many other things, random and seemingly unconnected, suddenly falling into place behind the scenes, in the unexamined corners of mind and circumstance. But it was as he was sitting with Mr. Wonka in his laboratory, and Mr. Wonka opened the little window that looked out into the testing room, and handed the slightly nervous-looking Oompa Loompa on duty his latest experimental candy that he thought it. Charlie started thinking, and he felt his skin on his cheeks buzz as the blood left them, and he leaned his head on the desk because his stomach felt sick, and he swallowed, and turned to Mr. Wonka who was just turning back from handing the candy through the opening.

“Do—do they all live, Mr. Wonka?”

“What, Charlie?”

“You—you’ve told me about Oompa Loompas that turned into blueberries, and Oompa Loompas that were… youthened… into minuses, and Oompa Loompas that have flown off into space from Fizzy Lifting Drinks… but… do these experiments ever… you know.” Charlie swallowed, and gripped the edge of the table hard.

Mr. Wonka paused, thinking, then said, “You are speaking too quietly, dear boy, next time, please speak up.” But he winced at Charlie’s stricken look.

“Mr. Wonka!”

Mr. Wonka spoke quietly, rapidly, looking down at his fidgeting hands. “I do what I can, Charlie, you must understand… every precaution is taken… but for the sake of progress…” His voice petered off.

“Progress,” said Charlie.

“I did tell that one to burp…” Mr. Wonka clasped and unclasped his hands between his knees, staring somewhere under the desk.

“But you don’t know that that one isn’t alright, somewhere, he may just have flown somewhere, he may be somewhere else…”

“No, Charlie,” he said after a pause. “No. The wind was blowing towards the smokestacks. It took a few days to find… find the body.”

Charlie wanted to lie down on the cold white tiles of the floor until his stomach subsided, and he wanted to throw the test tubes across the heavy countertops so that their bright bubbling liquids splattered among shards of glass, and he wanted to flee from that room and the sick, sweet smell of chocolate and never step into it again, but instead, he said quietly, with a steadiness that surprised him: “Was that the only one?”

Willy Wonka said nothing.

“Answer me. You have to.”

Mr. Wonka’s head shot up, and his demurring cracked and turned to steel. “Have to? There is nothing that I have to do, Charlie. Nothing. That is what this place is, haven’t you realized that by now?”

Charlie choked. “The dreamers of the dreams…”

“Yes. Do you remember the world, Charlie, the way it is outside? It has room for starving and mocking and being cruel and greedy… it has no room for dreamers. This is the place for those of us that have no place in that world, we are better than it, but we are trampled by it. It is a blessing and a curse, Charlie, to be as we are, but here we are safe, safer than we would be out there. Even the Oompa Loompas: no inventions of mine are as bad as their lives in the jungle were, fearing the wild beasts day and night, eating food they could barely choke down. Why, they had no educational system at all—”

Charlie shot up straight, and heard his chair clatter behind him as he did. “You did not give them one! You saw their village, their children, but you taught them nothing but how to mix your chocolate, and be guinea pigs for your strange and untested… concoctions. Do you know when they began to have an educational system? I know you do, because you remember the conversation at least as well as I do—I was only a child, after all—my mother came to you, feeling useless in this place, where you—where you had provided everything. And she offered to teach the Oompa Loompa children—and you tried to decline! You with the biggest library—is it the biggest library in the world? It might be. Even if it isn’t—it’s—it’s still pretty damn big! And when she went in there, into that village my mother found, your, your—slaves—couldn’t even read!”

Charlie’s voice dropped but he kept going, spitting poisoned words, though whether to expel them from his own gut or to burn Mr. Wonka, he could not tell. “Have you even read all the books in your library, Mr. Wonka? If you have you have either a bad memory… or a sick sense of humor. I’ve read… over in America, where they used to keep slaves, they used to hear them sing and say that they sang because they were happy—that it was a sign that they were happy, and that it was all alright. Do you believe that, Mr. Wonka? Do you? Because you told it to us the first time I saw your Oompa Loompas. I have only your word that they’re singing for joy, that they came with you willingly, that no life is better for them… do they have a choice? Do they have a choice and would you dare to give them one?”

Charlie had backed to the wall as he spoke, and he found that he had placed his hands against it to keep himself up. The stone felt rough and solid and cold, and he focused on it, because the rest of the world was hot and liquid and pulsating, and it wasn’t until he saw the tears in Mr. Wonka’s eyes that he realized he was crying himself.

“Charlie,” said Mr. Wonka. “Oh, Charlie. I can’t—I don’t think I can explain how it isn’t like that. It isn’t so unfair—I wouldn’t—I swear, it really was that bad for them back in their home, and I haven’t—there are things I could have—should have done better, but I have not been cruel…”

“Not…cruel? The day I met you, you tortured children, left them disfigured for life…”

“They were the better for the lesson, Charlie.”

“How do you know? How dare you… judge people… not just judge them, pronouncejudgment, and sentence them, to… torture… I don’t know what… did you know that we were all going to come out alive? Did you? You set the traps that would most trip us, and you must have been fascinated when we fell in… we didn’t have a chance. My God. The moment we stepped in here, we didn’t have a chance against you, you knew what we would all do, we were puppets in some stupid morality play… Mr. Wonka… How dare you consider yourself better than them… they were stupid, and sad, and greedy, and spoiled… but you… you were inhumanly cruel.”

Mr. Wonka was crying openly now, sitting on the bright floor. “Charlie, yes, in a way… it was like that, but then… don’t you understand what you are? I wanted someone to be obedient to me, to follow all my rules—yes, you were puppets, and I was the mad puppetmaster—I have always been like that—but there was to be a puppet paragon, who never broke the rules, and none of you were it. The fizzy lifting drinks—it was so disappointing, when no one came out pure. But you weren’t obedient, you were… good. When I saw that all the world was corrupt and horrid, you stepped forward and showed me that it wasn’t. And I’ve never forgotten the shock of that, Charlie. Please… run my factory, invent the inventions yet to be invented, and be better at it than I was… But please, don’t—”

“Mr. Wonka… I can’t.” And Charlie walked out.

Zoom.

Charlie was seventeen the day he went away to university. Mr. Wonka was subdued when he shook his hand goodbye—affectionate, but subdued. It was just a memory, maybe a fantasy, that vibrancy in him that Charlie remembered from the early, early days. Perhaps he still twinkled and danced in the rooms where Charlie was not, to himself or to his Oompa Loompas, for, whether there was something unfair in their treatment or not, their relationship with their employer always looked pleasant. Charlie wondered if he had been wrong in his accusations. It would be a sorry, sorry thing, to have been wrong.

Because ever since that day, more than a year ago, when Charlie had left Mr. Wonka sobbing on the floor of his experimenting room, he had found that something precious had been broken, and ever after, Mr. Wonka stepped so carefully around the shards of it that he hardly laughed in Charlie’s presence at all. Charlie never knew whether it was to keep from being cut to ribbons on those horrid shards, or because he was trying not to shatter them further. He didn’t know whether to mourn it abjectly or stand upon what he had learned to believe. Such is the way of growing up.

So Mr. Wonka shook Charlie’s hand tentatively and tenderly when the time came to say goodbye, but no more than that, and Charlie left as the late summer sun slanted through the high bars of the gates behind him.

Zoom.

When Charlie stood before the gates of the factory again, he was twenty-five years old, and not angry. The black iron was patched with brown rust, but the great chimneys still billowed white smoke, and some mechanical behemoth far away in the dark hummed contentedly. Overlaying the familiar city smells the white smoke emanated the well-remembered smell of chocolate. He didn’t know what to do, he knew of no way through the gates, so he stood there. It seemed silly, to stand there, like some magic would sense him and let him through, but it also seemed fitting. So Charlie stood.

It was deep dusk and Charlie’s legs ached from standing when the great doors creaked somewhere off in the gloom and a figure spilled uncertain lantern light across the cobblestones. The light showed nothing of who carried it, but the cadence of the bouncing swing, if a little slower than Charlie remembered it, was as familiar to him as the rhythm of his own breath.

He knew the exact second that the figure saw him, because the lantern stilled entirely for a long moment, then renewed its movements tentatively, more cautiously, as if its bearer were tiptoeing around the sharp shards of some long-broken thing. It was a long, slow time before Willy Wonka stopped a few feet before the gate, sunken and still and painfully mindful of the space between them. It was still longer before he spoke.

“The lock and chain are rusted, Charlie. I can’t open it.”

“There is no way through? None at all?”

“None,” said Willy Wonka, and he looked down at the pavement.

Charlie blinked down at the mad curls of hair, now inches below his eye level, a little more grizzled perhaps, but wild as ever, and felt dismay. And then he remembered the rules of Willy Wonka’s world.

“We are the musicmakers, and we are the dreamers of the dreams,” said Charlie. Willy Wonka looked up. Charlie paused, then looked into Willy Wonka’s sad eyes, and grinned, feeling the grin to be the emulation of a grin that had brightened his life for the first time thirteen years ago, and feeling no regret for that heritage. “I think between the two of us we can dream up a way to get me to the other side of this ruddy fence.”

Something clicked on like a lightswitch—no, that was too straightforward. Something ignited like the fuse of some preposterous, lovely confectionary machine somewhere behind and within the washed out purple coat and faded form of Willy Wonka, and the whole of him came to light and life at once. Instantly, his hands, fingers, eyes, mouth, shoulders, legs and all the rest of him were in motion, the old charming, purposeless, extraneous gestures and fidgets that expressed nothing in particular but a sense of general joy. His chest had filled suddenly, and his shoulders had drawn back and all of him was pressed against the bars, though there seemed to have been no intervening time in which he could have crossed the distance to them.

Charlie reached forward with his arms outstretched, but Willy Wonka’s old gold-tipped cane whipped up with a whoosh and shivered an inch from Charlie’s nose, and the little man’s bright eyes flashed still brighter.

“You will not embrace me through the bars of this cage, dear boy. We will get you through it first.”

Charlie blinked and grinned. “Yes, sir.”

“Now that fence is topped with little points, I won’t have you climbing it.”

“Fizzy lifting drink?”

“You do like that stuff, don’t you. But outdoors? And you would have so little control… But we’ll tie a taffy rope to your middle first, toss it over the fence, yes, a sort of human kite!”

“Be sure to tie down the other end first… it won’t help us if we’re both end up suspended above your smokestack, and you dangling from the end of a string of taffy…”

“Good, good! I won’t be a moment!” Willy Wonka was off and back in far less than the time his first trip across the courtyard had taken.

In the end it worked more or less without mishap, other than a few miscalculations on the stretchiness of the taffy (“Perhaps it is because of the humidity?” “Yes! That would be it. It doesn’t seem likely to break though, I think. I checked my barometer this morning, and it did not appear to be a taffy-snapping sort of day.” “Oh… well, that’s good. Does ‘taffy-snapping day’ happen to be one of the markings on your barometer?” “Yes.”) and the sudden remembrance of certain small difficulties at the moment when Charlie was to come down. (“Odsbodikins, boy! You do not mean to tell me you’ve forgotten how to burp?”) But in the end, Charlie remembered, and before long the two found themselves seated on a bank of mint grass in the edible fairyland that was the main room of the factory, sipping from brimming mugs of pure molten chocolate.

They smiled back and forth at each other, exchanged the news, then smiled back and forth some more, and then found that the strange awkwardness had stolen back in, and sat between them, arms folded and eyebrows raised like a crusty and disapproving aunt, impervious even to frothing chocolate.

“…You’ll want to see your family I suppose. They’re all here, a few years older perhaps, but well as ever.”

“Yes… yes, it’s been a while.”

“…Shall we go find them, then?”

“In… in a while. Not yet. I wanted to… talk to you first.”

“Ah.”

Charlie swallowed. “Do you remember that day in your laboratory?”

Willy Wonka’s mouth twitched, and Charlie found it was the first time he had ever seen him smile without any mirth at all.

“…Stupid question, I guess.”

Willy Wonka shook off the dreary expression, drew closer to Charlie with a very wise look, and said in a low voice, “My dear boy, there are no stupid questions, just whistling antelopes.”

Charlie blinked, and the cold, awkward creature between them gave them both a quizzical look and scooted back a little ways, giving them some more room.

Charlie snorted a little bark of relief. “Thanks… maybe.” But he still didn’t know what to say.

“Charlie… I need to know whether you’ll still take on the running of my factory. Your family is welcome here to the end of their days, have no worries on that account. But if you won’t—if you won’t, I must plan for it, make arrangements…”

“Find someone else, you mean?” Charlie regretted his tone instantly. “No… sorry, don’t answer that. I know it isn’t easy for you. I don’t know… if I don’t take it, I’ll help you find someone… or whatever you want to do… but… I don’t know yet.” Charlie sighed, shifted himself closer to Willy Wonka so that they sat nearly shoulder to shoulder, and stared out over the chocolate river. “I guess I’m not really what you wanted, am I? A child, who would run the factory they way you wanted it run, who would be filled with wonder by it every day, and always keep the spirit you’ve always had… I… I grew up, I guess. Mr. Wonka, I’m so—”

“Sorry, Charlie? For growing up?”

“Sometimes.”

“Oh my dear, dear boy, do you still think that everything I say is immutable? When I said that I wanted a child that would do what I told him… you know how I am, Charlie. I’m a bit of—”

Charlie gave him a grin and a sidelong look. “A manipulative and control-obsessed son of a whangdoodle?”

Willy Wonka grinned wryly, but really. “I was going to say ‘unempathetic puppeteer,’ but I like yours.”

Charlie laughed with relief. And laughed. And laughed again, until he was lying against the slope of mint grass, staring up through glowing gummy-bear fruit and shining spearmint leaves. After a while, he sat up, and looked down to where Willy Wonka was lying in the grass beside him, mirthful eyes closed, body rocking with the silent aftershocks of a series of belly laughs.

“The Oompa-Loompas…” Charlie began. Willy Wonka’s eyes snapped open. Charlie turned himself to face the chocolatier directly, and Willy Wonka raised himself on his elbows. “If I am to run the factory, I need to satisfy my conscience that the Oompa-Loompas are being treated right… they need to have a choice in their employment, and the experimentation must stop… I don’t know where to begin…”

Willy Wonka’s eyes rekindled their twinkle, and he seemed to be making a great effort not to fall back on the grass laughing through sheer joy. “The beginning is often preferable, dear boy. Why don’t you talk to them?”

Charlie smiled. Abruptly, a thought struck him, and he rose to his knees, then grabbed Willy Wonka’s arm and dragged him up too so that both knelt, facing each other, a few feet apart. “I want to do it formally, let’s start over, let’s start everything over.” Willy Wonka looked at him, wide-eyed. “Mr. Wonka,” said Charlie, holding out his hand, “if the offer remains, I would like to learn the workings of your factory, and run it cooperatively with you, or alone, when you see fit to retire. If given this position, I swear to expend the utmost efforts of my intelligence, creativity, and conscience to run it to the best of my capability.”

Willy Wonka grasped Charlie’s hand in both of his and shook it vigorously. “I accept! My dear boy, I accept! Oh, there is so much to do!” He pulled Charlie to his feet. “I have so many new inventions to show you, and so much that I would love to have your opinion on… now tell me honestly, do you think candy fireworks would be too difficult to eat? The best fireworks are always the ones that are so close that they fall directly on top of you, so why not make them better by, instead of, say, running and screaming, people could just tilt back their heads, and open their mouths, and instead of burning them, it would taste like strawberry! And that’s just the beginning of it! Charlie? …What is it, Charlie?”

Charlie was following only slowly, despite the insistence of Willy Wonka’s tugging at his sleeve, not reluctant, but overwhelmed. Willy Wonka paused uncertainly, and looked back at him. Charlie smiled, shyly. “How much I’ve missed you, Mr. Wonka.”

Willy Wonka ducked his head to rub his eye with the velvet cuff of his coat, then took Charlie by the shoulders, looking up at him, for Charlie was several inches taller now than he. “My dear, dear boy…” And then Willy Wonka embraced him, and Charlie felt again the thin shoulders under the velvet that was getting a little threadbare and the tickle of his unruly hair, and smelled the old familiar smell of burnt sugar and chocolate and cinnamon and dark labyrinths of old caves beneath an ignorant city and the shimmering dust that one finds on strange and wondrous things.

“My dear boy, welcome home.”