A/N: Another Wonka fic! Another venture into thinking far to seriously about literature mankind was simply not meant to ponder with excessive depth!

Ah, but it amuses me to think too hard on stories like that… That, and I really do think this story (at least the old movie version… I have my doubts on the book, and I can’t say much on the new movie as it isn’t out yet) does interesting things under scrutiny. Wonka, walking his ever intriguing and surprising line between adorable and disturbing… the effort to extrapolate an adult personality for Charlie from the vanilla he came with… It can be a fun universe to write for.

It was one of those days when absolutely everything smelled like burnt fudge. Honestly. Everything. Wonka smelled his bowtie before he tied it, just to make sure, and sure enough, the bowtie, too, smelled burnt and fudgey.

It was about eleven o’clock in the morning when Wonka ventured forth from his bedroom into the hallway and looked around to determine whether it was a trick of the light that the air seemed brownish and smoky. No trick. He gripped his cane and brought it down hard on the marble floor in annoyance, then leaned both hands on it, collecting himself. The deep breath he took for the same purpose made him cough and reel back into his room to fish out his handkerchief and tie it over his mouth before he would dare tackle the choking fumes again.

As he tied the handkerchief, he glanced into the mirror and noticed that his face was covered in green, thumbprint-sized spots, and that his hair was standing out from his head more wildly than usual, looking slightly purple. It was purple. Wonka growled a string of gruff nonsense syllables under his breath, for no relevant well-turned phrases were forthcoming, and it didn’t befit the world’s foremost chocolatier to swear. He was coming pretty fum mfrunting close, though.

There was a knock.

“Enter,” growled Wonka.

The door opened slowly, and Charlie, age twenty-six, peered around the corner, looking singed and contrite, with what looked like a bandit’s bandana covering his mouth and nose, and his glasses (a new development since university) absolutely opaque with soot. Wonka lowered the handkerchief he had just fastened.

“It’s breathable in here, barely. Come in and close the door.” Charlie complied, and Wonka saw that the rest of him was burnt and blackened as well. “Well?” said Wonka, folding his arms.

For a moment Charlie examined the patterns of the ornate carpet, worn threadbare in the places Wonka liked to pace, but he composed his fidgeting hands and looked up before too long. His gaze was sheepish, but he held eye contact steadily enough. Wonka considered being proud of him for it, but decided he was far too annoyed for that.

“You should sit down, Mr. Wonka,” Charlie said quietly.

“Why—” Wonka took another deep, calming breath, and swallowed the impending cough that that brought on. “Why would I want to do that, dare I ask? I think I would prefer to stand if it’s all the same to—augh.” The world was only wavery for an instant and Wonka returned to himself a moment after Charlie caught him, before he reached the ground. Wonka blinked at him, bewildered.

“As I said, you really should sit down.”

“What the deuce did you do?”

“Can you stand up? Here, the chair isn’t far. I’ll help you. Nearly there now… good.” Wonka sank heavily into the green velvet. Charlie straightened, began to pull a chair over for himself, glanced at his charred coat, and sat down on the floor instead. Wonka waved him back to the chair.

“Don’t worry about it.” Charlie sat in the chair. “Now, what is going on?”

Charlie took off his glasses and rubbed the bridge of his nose. “Which part do you want to hear about first?”

“Oh dear. Well, why did I just fall over, first of all?”

“I was wondering whether you would remember that. That part’s your fault. And it’s the same reason you slept until nearly noon, your hair is purple, and you’re covered in green blotches, interestingly enough.”

“And that reason is…?”

Charlie looked up from polishing the grime off his glasses with the slightly cleaner hem of his sooty shirt. He put them on, squinted, and took them off again. “That you’re a stubborn ass of an artist is the reason… sir.”

Wonka scratched his frizzled violet curls, thinking back. “Oh! Was I experimenting?”

“If by experimenting you mean recklessly testing dangerous confections on yourself without me or anyone else there in the middle of the night… then yes.”

“You’ve forbidden all testing on Oompa Loompas on pain of your refusing to work here, of which I can certainly see the morality, but what choice does it leave me, Charlie? I can’t very well sell untested candy to children.”

“Let me see. You could… wait to test candy until you’re reasonably sure ingesting it won’t kill you? Do it when I’m there and know what you’re taking, so I have some chance in hell of undoing it if it screws up? Keep some record of your damned ingredients so that when by pure luck I walk into the Experimenting Room at two in the morning and find you multicolored and passed out on the floor among weird gumballs I’ve never seen the likes of before, I have some way of gauging the likelihood that you’ll ever wake up?”

Charlie had rested his elbow on his knees and shadowed his eyes with his blackened hand, squeezing their outer corners with his finger and thumb. Wonka frowned keenly at him a moment, then forced himself to his feet, still a little wobbly, but he managed to cross over to stand in front of Charlie and put both hands on his shoulders. “Charlie.”

Charlie didn’t look up. “You should sit down, Mr. Wonka.”

“Charlie, are you all right?”

“I’m fine,” said Charlie to the floor. “I’m not the one who’s been ingesting substances unknown to science. You, however, should sit down.”

“Charlie.” Wonka let go of his Charlie’s shoulder with one hand (he was holding himself up with the other) and found his disciple’s chin, tilting the boy’s—young man’s, rather—face up to look at him. “Look at me, Charlie.” Charlie was scowling fiercely, but on closer examination, the expression seemed more strain than rage. His lower lip was shuddering, and his cheeks, thin even after years of decent amounts of food, were tight and clenched. He met Wonka’s eyes for an instant, but it shattered his composure, and he looked down again quickly. Wonka knelt down in front of him, gripping both his shoulders again.

“It’s only candy, Charlie. If it were dangerous, I wouldn’t be making it.”

Charlie barked something sort of like a laugh, covering his eyes again. “You know that you’re lying. But stop this, go sit down. I know nothing’s wrong, there’s nothing to worry about, so go over there and sit down so I don’t have to catch you when you faint again.”

“I’m all right, Charlie.”

“I know that.” Charlie was still speaking a little too quickly.

“Charlie—”

“Thirteen thousand gallons.”

“What?”

“I managed to destroy thirteen thousand gallons of fudge this morning.”

“What?”

“There was a boiler problem, I was trying to fix it. But I was distracted this morning… It’s a wonder I didn’t burn the whole factory down.” Wonka must have looked very threatening indeed, because Charlie’s eyes widened and he added quickly, “I didn’t burn it down, I swear. And the fire’s out, now. It… it’s bad, though. I was working on the boilers that make the fudge in the river the right temperature and viscosity… the Oompa Loompas had reported inconsistencies in it… I really should have turned the whole thing off and… I don’t know, calmed down somewhere, but I wanted to get it done, and it didn’t seem that bad, but I couldn’t keep my mind on it…”

“How bad is the damage, Charlie?”

“…Bad, sir. The boiler caught on fire, the river is a blackened mess, and a lot of the machinery needs to be replaced.”

Wonka began muttering the nonsense curse-sounds under his breath again. Charlie sighed and stood up. Wonka got his feet after him, lurching and still light-headed. Charlie moved to steady him, but Wonka ignored the gesture and leaned on the back of the chair instead. “Do you know how much this sets us back, Charlie? And the replacement parts… these aren’t machines that sit around in the back rooms of factories waiting to be shipped out! Each part of every machine needs to be ordered specially, built specially, shipped individually from a different factory so that no one knows enough of the designs to leak it to the competition…”

“I know, sir. I’m sorry. I’ll go see what needs to be done.”

“Stop. Sit down. And tell me what’s wrong.”

“I told you. The boiler, burnt chocolate…”

“Charlie. You know very well that’s not—”

“The Oompa Loompas are waiting for me. Don’t do too much today, I’ll take care of it.” Charlie closed the door behind him.

Such a mess. Charlie would work diligently now, but he was being inordinately quiet. The parts would be ordered and the soot-filled river cleaned, but the whole disaster was nagging at Wonka. It was… disappointing to see Charlie so careless. And perhaps that was unfair, but if Charlie couldn’t handle the factory for one morning without Wonka… what would happen to it in the years ahead? How could he dare to retire someday, knowing that the whole factory could burn to the ground in a week? Was Charlie not the right one after all?

It was sickening to doubt like that, but if it were true… it were best to know now.