A/N: Ever since Frank said, "When you knocked, he thought you were the candyman," I haven't been able to get this out of my head. I mean, yes, of course, he was referring to a drug dealer, but ... ya see ...
Disclaimer: I do not assume ownership of anything. This story will contain eventual slash and a multitude of morally questionable things. Reader discretion is advised.
It gets hot in the city in the summer, a cloying, damp heat that settles down over the skyscrapers like a saccharine curtain. It feels like breathing in cotton candy, stifling yet impalpable.
Willy Wonka likes the heat because he is perpetually too chilly. He sits in a bathtub, drinking champagne slowly from a cut crystal glass. The bathroom which he occupies is spacious and has french doors to a small balcony, which are presently wide open. If there were a breeze, the night air might blow through and brush against the gauzy curtains which frame the doors, but the night (or rather, very early morning) is still.
He falls asleep like this and doesn't wake up for a time, not until the bathwater has long since reached room temperature, not until the sun finally beings to kiss the edges of the city and brush its fingers along the hem of the curtains. Consciousness comes in a rush, as does a pounding headache, and not for the first time he regrets staying up for so many hours and falling asleep in such uncomfortable places.
Willy Wonka may be a genius, may be unparalleled at so many things, but looking after himself is not one of these things. He stretches, making his joints snap, and looks at the face on the pocket watch resting in the pile of clothes on the chair beside the bath. 5:12. He sighs.
XXX
It's silly how much these earthlings rely on time, Frank-N-Furter thinks absently, toying with the hands on the downstairs grandfather clock. Time is a human construct. He places one index finger on the edge of the big hand and spins it around and around (backwards). He likes the sounds the gears make as they grind together. The clock doesn't work anymore.
Frank-N-Furter is a genius too. But at the present, he's dreadfully, dreadfully bored, and this makes him (as it does most geniuses) moody and prone to fits of anger. The heat isn't helping either. He hates the heat because it makes his makeup run.
He continues to spin the clock's hand around and around, at an ever increasing pace, until Magenta smacks his hand away with her feather duster.
He gives her a reproachful look, like a dog whose toy has just been snatched away.
XXX
He needs an heir. He really does, because although the Wonka-Vite will prevent any aging, the general public is bound to get suspicious. They already are, really, and he just cannot have any more government officials sticking their sticky little hands in places they don't belong. But he has little idea how to procure one.
He has tried many different plans, to little avail. Coercing culinary students. Snatching children off the street. That disastrous contest.
None of them work, and they usually end in murder to some degree or another. The culinary students want to actually make candy. The street urchins don't have manners, nor are they interested in acquiring any. And the contest? Well, he thinks he is really on to something with that. Sure, ⅘ of the children are despicable brats, but they are easily, er, dealt with, and the remaining one. Oh, Charlie!
Adorable, angelic, worships the ground he walks on, polite and gentle. His family is poor (read: very easy to coerce). Except, of course (Of course! Of course!) it couldn't be that easy. Insolent wretch. No, my dear, your family will absolutely not be coming with you!
It would be very easy to take him by force, but by now Wonka has quite enough blood on his hands. Besides, he can't stand crying.
XXX
Two hours later, by the dusty clock in the attic that still runs, despite (or maybe because of) the fact that no one has ever touched it, and Frank's still desperately bored. He's so bored, he has take to listing off the things which he is bored with from his perch in a creaky leather armchair in the parlor. He's bored of the weather because Earth only has four seasons and even less forms of precipitation (It only ever rains water here! How monotonous!). He's bored of the people here; their silly arguments and stupid social standards. He's bored of working on his Creature, partly because one can only draw out polysaccharides and carbon chains for so long before they all run together, and partly because he keeps making so many vital errors. He's bored of Riff Raff and Magenta and especially Columbia, whose shrill voice is currently making mincemeat of his already damaged nerves.
"Frankie! Look!" she says, waving a hand up and down in front of his glazed expression. "Look what Mags and I found at the grocers' for you!" She dumps two fistfulls of brightly packaged somethings in his lap. "It's candy!"
He sighs in an affected manner and looks at Columbia's grinning face. She claps her hands together in ill-concealed anticipation. "Have you ever had candy before?"
He curls his upper lip every-so-slightly. "Of course, you idiot, just because I'm from another planet doesn't mean we didn't have sugarcane!" Still, he picks up a square paper package from the multitude on his lap. Across the top is written 'Prodnose's EverLinger Winterspring Chewing Gum' in a garish blue font. He begins to regret his previous statement.
He tightens the corners of his mouth. "What's gum?"
Columbia's eyes widen in glee. So despite that patronizing dismissal, he hasn't ever had gum! She giggles. "It's for chewing," she explains. "It's hard at first but it goes soft in your mouth, you'll see!"
"I can't imagine anything going soft in my mouth," says Frank distastefully. "What's the point of it, then?"
"Hmmmm," thinks Columbia out loud. "Well, I suppose it doesn't really have a point. You just chew it until all the flavor is gone 'n' then you spit it out. Oh! And you can blow bubbles, too."
"Ugh, why does anyone want it?" asks Frank, in what he perceives to be a rhetorical tone. Evidently, Columbia does not catch it and begins droning on in that atrocious high-pitched voice.