I have OCD. Sometimes the only solution is to inflict it upon a fictional character.
This is like. The opposite of Dark!Wonka.
His father always said he had too much imagination and it irritated him to no end to think that he might be right. For years, imagination had been his sole method of existence in that, for one thing, he used it to earn a living, and for another, he used it to stay alive. Imagination allowed him to disappear into himself, to forget the world around him.
When the world around him started leaking into his imagination, that was a problem.
For years, bad and good had been simple and easy to define: he could separate the one from the other as easily as squirrels sorting nuts. The separate ideas had distinct rings to them, and he could toss one aside and keep the other easily, and sleep soundly at night.
And then he couldn't. The sleeping, not the keeping and the tossing. He still knew the rules, still performed by them. That hadn't changed. If anything, he was better at them now. More vigilant, more careful, because now, after all, new people were relying on him.
It had taken him years after moving the Oompa Loompas into his factory to really feel like he could step into the corridors of his factory without hurting them, somehow, for a host of reasons that were increasingly nonsensical and increasingly, well, imaginative.
In the past few years, he had forgotten what that fear felt like, until it gripped him again. The Buckets were good people, and he didn't want to hurt them, but in the meantime, an unending list of imagined scenarios that were unimaginably harmful were queuing in his mind.
Fate was trying to bring him out of his shell as his thoughts dragged him back in. Bad timing. Almost as bad as the timing of a disappearing house, or disappearing recipes, and those scenarios only provided more fodder for his fears. He had trusted so many people, until they had hurt him. He could not stand the thought of being the one to break someone's trust, could not see himself as someone worth trusting.
So he did what he always did. He retreated. The Buckets saw less and less of him, and when he looked in the mirror, he saw less and less of himself. He fancied himself a square candy that looked round, something that changed the longer you looked at it.
So he stopped looking. He moved the proverbial house, and he called it Prophecy, called it Destiny, called it You're-Looking-More-And-More-Like-Your-Father-Every-Day-Now.
He disappeared. He broke the mirror, and existed in shards. It never felt like enough, but it was the best he could do. In the same way that he had once relied on his imagination to survive, he now survived in spite of it. Of all the wide world of endless possibilities, this one was unimaginable. He laughed at the irony.
And Charlie started to wonder if he had inherited an empty factory.