I’m curious as to how accurate these portrayals of the characters seem… I got one review that may or may not have been implying that Charlie seemed out of character (it was short, and a bit cryptic…) I’m not sure whether that’s a general perception, or just the one person, so I’m curious, and asking, how these characters as written by me measure up. Of course, this takes place about 15 years after the books ended, and I view Charlie as having changed considerably in that time. But still, if what I’ve written isn’t Charlie, it isn’t Charlie. Same goes for Wonka.

So, anyway, here goes something or other. I hope you enjoy it!

Wonka blinked and managed to focus. Charlie’s face was directly in front of him, and he looked furious. Wonka had the feeling he’d been having a very interesting and elaborate dream, but the sight of Charlie had distracted him from it, and he couldn’t remember what it had been. He was pretty sure he hadn’t been out for long. He tried to sit up, but Charlie snarled and pushed him back down.

“I thought you had gone to bed,” said Wonka.

“You could have been killed!”

“It seems unlikely.”

Charlie yanked him up by the collar and made him look a few feet to his left where a vat of molasses boiled, near overflowing. Wonka choked because the collar was pressing on his throat. Charlie laid him back hastily, apparently afraid that he had done some damage. His hands flit and fluttered like flies, rearranging things, fiddling with Wonka’s purple lapel, loosening Wonka’s tie. He looked… terrified.

“Charlie, I’m all right.”

“What’s the test for a concussion… I think I’m supposed to wave my fingers in front of you or something, and you follow them?”

“Charlie. Stop waving. Hold still.” Wonka managed to capture the young man’s erratically gesturing arms by both wrists, then transferred them to one hand and used the other to grasp Charlie’s shoulder and pull himself to a sitting position. Charlie yielded, but he seemed to be scrutinizing every motion for the slightest sign of something wrong. Even admitting a certain foolhardiness in late-night experimentation, Charlie was vastly overreacting. Wonka decided on a test. The word “test” reminded him of the last fight, but he put it from his mind. This one was warranted, and for a better purpose.

“Augh,” said Wonka, grasping his head in his hands and drawing up his knees. Charlie was galvanized instantly into more harried inaction, pawing and fussing solicitously. He looked as if he were about to cry.

Abruptly, Wonka straightened and seized the younger man’s lower jaw and tilted his head so that the two looked eye to eye. He held Charlie’s gaze steadily, banishing all pretense of pain. Charlie was caught too much off balance to object.

“Charlie,” he said slowly and distinctly. “Tell me. What’s. Wrong.”

“N-nothing. There’s nothing—”

“Don’t lie. Every day for the past week, you’ve been looking haunted, and you have a perpetual air of wanting to say something that you’re not going to say. You look… positively huffy every time I walk… into… this… room… Ah.” Wonka narrowed his eyes and examined Charlie closely before he let go and shifted so that he was sitting against the wall, motioning Charlie beside him. Charlie complied with a wary look. In order to confuse him utterly, Wonka switched gears. “How’s your family, Charlie?” he asked conversationally. “I spoke to your mother not long ago… she seems to be making excellent progress teaching the Oompa Loompas. Your Grandpa Joe, last I saw, seems spry as ever… it’s rather shocking to think that he’s over a hundred already… so both of them seem to be still much the same as always, as far as I can tell… but the other three, so sad. It was such a short span of time, too. ‘…Not single spies, but in battalions,’ as they say.”

Charlie shrugged. He was looking slightly off to the side, so his expression was difficult to see. “It all makes sense though, if you think about it. So many years with the same habits… they adjusted to being in the factory all right, but the three of them were so much a unit that once one was gone, the others were bound to follow before too long. And they all lived quite a long time.”

“Always ready with the sane, logical explanations, aren’t you.”

“Don’t you believe that?”

“Oh yes. I believe it.”

“…What are you getting at?”

“I may be careless, but I’m not a complete idiot. I’ve survived living with myself for an awfully long time, you know. Being knocked out and getting green spots is a little out of the ordinary, I grant you—”

“By the way, they are fading very nicely, sir.”

“Thank you, and stop changing the subject just because you hate confrontation, especially on the rare occasions when I’m the one that’s right. And don’t call me ‘sir.’ You only do it when you’re furious, terrified, or patronizing me nowadays, anyway. As I was saying, being knocked out and getting green spots is a little out of the ordinary, but very little of what I do is really life-threatening, and you know that.”

“Yes, I know.”

“Again with that logic. You are far too sane for your own good, or at least you pretend to be. If you knew it wasn’t life-threatening, why did you nearly burn down our factory worrying about it?”

“I… didn’t?”

“Listen carefully, Charlie: only three. Not four, not five, not six. Just three.”

“What?”

“Isn’t that what this is about? Half of everyone you care about snuffed it in the space of about a month and you’re waiting for the other half to wander off to that great candy factory in the sky after them?”

“Now you’re being crude.”

You aren’t going to lose us all in the space of five months, Charlie. Just the three. That’s all. You don’t need to think that way. Your mother is going to be around for many more years, and it’ll take more than candy to kill me. As for your Grandpa Joe, at the rate he’s going, he’ll outlive us all.”

“I know that.”

“I know you know it, what I doubt is that you actually believe it. Charlie.” Wonka turned himself to face his pupil fully. “I’m not going to die any time soon.”

“You can’t know—”

“Charlie. I’m not going to.”

“How do you—”

“Charlie. It isn’t going to happen. I’m not going to die. Well, someday, obviously. But there isn’t a pattern to this, or some force hell-bent on making you miserable. Those of us that aren’t dead are still alive. Stop waiting for that to change. I am not going to die.”

Charlie opened his mouth to argue, but the metaphorical bit of wall that Wonka had been chiseling at for the past several minutes gave out at last, and Charlie pulled his knees up suddenly, nearly to his chest, and jerked his face away to stare at the messy shelves and weird mechanical objects in the opposite direction. It was a little surprising how small his lanky figure could still condense itself. He shuddered slightly, and his breathing hiccupped in great gasping breaths, not actually crying, but fighting hard against it.

Wonka sat perfectly still for a moment, unsure of how to react now that he had forced the truth he’d been looking for. The child he remembered would have been sobbing, and it was disconcerting how much older Charlie had become. That generous, easily-wounded core that was quintessentially Charlie might still be there, but Wonka always found the adult shell that sheathed it so complicated and unfamiliar that he never knew quite how to respond when he was directly faced with it.

Slowly, with several stops and starts, Wonka reached out a hand, let it hover indecisively in the air for a moment, then brought it to rest on Charlie’s shoulder. Charlie stilled for an instant, and Wonka began to think seriously on the pros and cons of running away. But Charlie’s hand unwound its grip on his knees and gripped Wonka’s, hard. Wonka sighed with relief. Otherwise, neither moved.

After a few minutes, Charlie’s breathing evened out, and he shook himself and turned back, with a slightly embarrassed duck of his head and an abashed grin. “Sorry. …Thanks.”

They rearranged themselves to sit shoulder to shoulder and leaned against the wall a while in silence. Charlie was gazing thoughtfully at the ceiling. “You should get hit on the head more often,” he said at last. “It does wonders for your psychic ability.”

Wonka smiled up at the clouds of steam billowing and dissipating above them. “I’ll have to run more tests on that to verify. Care to help?”

“Gladly. Especially on the occasions when you thoroughly deserve to be thwacked over the head with something.”

“They seem to be more numerous than I would have expected.”

Charlie slouched down and leaned his head sideways so it rested against Wonka’s shoulder. “I would have to agree with that.” Looking down at his face from above, Wonka saw him grin suddenly. “So, what if we made these gumdrops that look perfectly innocent until you’re about to put them in your mouth, and then this arm shoots out of them holding a gigantic mallet and whacks you over the head?”

“We could call them ‘Wonka’s Wacky Whackers.’ Ah! And advertise that they improve psychic ability.”

“By ‘strategically jostling the psychic nerve centers’”

“‘To match the rhythm of the—’”

“‘The mystical rhythm,’ you forgot ‘mystical’”

“All right, ‘to match the mystical rhythm of the psychic vibrations’”

“‘That emanate from the minds of your friends’”

“‘When and if your friends have minds’”

“‘And translate them into your mind’s’”

“‘Mystical mental wavelengths’”

“‘And give you a fabulous concussion, to boot.’”

“I can’t help feeling that the concussion line detracts from the general message, Charlie.”

“I think that the whole thing is a little wordy, actually. And that we used the word mystical too many times.”

“We’ll have to work on that.”

They went back to staring at the eddying steam.

“We’re doomed to die buried under a pile of lawsuits, someday,” said Charlie conversationally. “You know that, right?”

“Oh yes. It’s why my experimenting doesn’t scare me. Wonka never shall vanquished be/ Until droves of lawyers, numbering thirty-three/ Shall inform him that thirty-three lawsuits be/ Pending over his head, you see/ And up jumped Wonka, right into the pile of lawsuits/ ‘You’ll never catch me alive,’ said he/ And his ghost may be heard as you walk beside the pile of lawsuits/ ‘Tee-hee, tee-hee, tee-hee!’”

“Hang on, you switched references halfway through…”

“When you prophesy your death, feel free to use as many literary allusions as you see fit.”

“I don’t think it’s even possible to drown in thirty-three pieces of paper…”

“Ah, but each lawsuit was exceptionally wordy, so the number of pages was quite a bit more than that.”

“I still don’t think it’s possible to drown—”

“Unless the papers were underwater…”

“How the heck would they end up—”

Wonka looked haughty. “When the time comes for me to die, then we will know.” He turned serious. “But that time—”

“Isn’t soon.” Charlie smiled. “Got it.”

“Good.”

The End.

A/N: I’ve been trying for a while to think of a good word or phrase to describe the sort of thing Charlie and Wonka are doing at the end—it’s a kind of tongue-in-cheek over-evaluation of a totally hypothetical and usually impossible scenario, invoking intentionally faulty logic for the sake of sheer amusement. It’s something I do incessantly myself, but I’ve never found a decent way to describe it to other people. The best I can come up with to express it is “creative bullshitting,” which doesn’t quite convey what I mean.