"Temple" (5-10-06)
PG
Charlie/Wonka
Warnings: a bit morbid/angsty
In the middle of the night Charlie would lie on Wonka's chest with an ear to his heart and listen to its slowed thumping beat. The hollow echo roared as if he were hearing it from within.
He didn't like it.
Willy Wonka didn't belong in that body. There was a skeleton inside of it, and dozens of organs churning and pounding their vulgar human functions. It was far easier to imagine Mr. Wonka as a machine, an extraterrestrial, a god -- never anything as deficient as a human. Humans were people like himself and his schoolteacher and the man who ran the grocery store and the woman who swept the walk in front of her house, and Grandpa Joe...whose own heart had quietly wound down just last week.
Every tick that passed brought this beating heart further along its countdown. Occasionally it would shuffle in a half-skipped beat, but that was normal for a human, and just as ordinary. Each one precious, but each one so easily lost. Charlie listened to hours of the chocolatier's life pass by, heard gallons of blood rush through him. He often had the impulse to wake Mr. Wonka, to warn him he was dying, slowly dying, day by day. That they were all dying. That they had so little time to do the enormous number of things they had to do. One day, Willy Wonka would be gone, and Charlie would be in his place. If left alone prematurely, the boy foresaw failure which would break Wonka's heart -- living or dead. Though it sounded steady and healthy now, one day it would stop.
As one day Charlie's would stop. And he would have to hope his own offspring or heir would be sufficiently trained to take over from him. In another dark bedroom he would worry over his own child's heartbeat, willing it to be strong and eternal, not just for his own sake, but for the sake of Mr. Wonka and his factory...
...Mr. Wonka, who lay so eerily still, heedless of Charlie's pleas for his immortality.
In the middle of the night Charlie would lie on Wonka's chest with an ear to his lungs and listen to the crescendo of each rolling breath. The hollow echo roared as if he were hearing it from within.
He didn't like it...