AN: This wasn't a story I intended to write. Honest to God, I promise I wasn't planning on starting YET ANOTHER fic. I initially started scribbling this down as a little bit of fluff to give me a break from my very serious and research-heavy Founders fic and Joker/Harley series. My brain needed something pointless to play with while I was between chapters of my other stories (and frankly exhausted from them). I was just going to write one scene, Willy Wonka getting a Hogwarts letter. One-shot, end scene, that's a wrap.

You can see how well that plan went.

So here I am, posting what looks like the start of another multi-installment fic. Yippee. I want you all to know that this is still not going to be my focus. It won't be researched and slaved over like my Founders fic or my Joker stories. It will be, quite honestly, a little slapdash - I wrote it and posted it in a week as opposed to, say, the MONTHS I spend on other chapters. I'm still going to treat this story as a playground that I visit when my brain needs a rest. As a consequence, it may not get updated on the regular. It may never even get finished. It might even - !gasp! - be a quick, dirty hack job that doesn't measure up to my other stories. And, most importantly... I don't think it has a point. I don't think I'm going anywhere with it, and that's okay.

As Charlie Bucket said, "Candy doesn't have to have a point. That's why it's candy." And you know what? Fanfic doesn't have to have a point either. It just has to make us happy.

I

There was a whopping great yew tree that stood by itself in the middle of St. Peter's churchyard, and on this particular evening its branches swished backward and forward in a breeze as if trying to avoid the drops of rain that would soon be falling upon them. This tree was surrounded on all sides by the flat slabs of grave stones, plain and age-worn near the square tower of the church and polished and new further up the slope. Atop the very old church tower was a very old weathervane, and this was creaking and rocking in its place as the wind brought a storm in closer. None of this, of course, was particularly unusual for a late spring evening in England.

What was unusual was the little boy who was sat beneath the whipping branches of the whopping great churchyard tree.

This little boy was named Willy, and he had been sat there for an hour or more, thinking to himself that although today had been his birthday, it had been quite an unsatisfactory birthday indeed.

Willy was a small boy with black hair and dark eyes. He was wearing his school uniform – a dull-colored jacket and short trousers – because he had finished his school term that day and had not taken the time to change his clothes. He did not wear the cap that belonged with the uniform, but this was not because he did not like caps; rather, it was because all of the space on the top of his head was taken up by the wires and bars of a metal contraption that went all the way round his head, front and back, top and bottom, to hold his teeth in their correct places. Willy's father was a dentist, and nothing disturbed him more than the notion of a child whose teeth did not conform to the pictures in his books. Willy had worn the contraption for several years, and his prospects for getting out of it did not look any better on this birthday than they had on the last. In fact, all things considered, they looked rather worse.

Willy had now had eleven birthdays, and having taken stock of them, he would have to say that this one had definitely been the worst. Of course, there were three or four of them that he could not quite remember, and so he supposed something awful might have happened long ago that would outweigh this day's events – perhaps a cousin tipping his cake onto his head, or having the chickenpox. But if he didn't remember them, then they really shouldn't count, and so he confirmed to himself that this birthday number eleven must be the worst of the lot. The day had begun with school exam results, which were the worst sort of birthday present, in Willy's opinion. He had gotten his usual high marks in science and in writing; but his geography marks had been dreadful, and he had been afraid to look at his maths. Only Miss Prestwood who served the luncheon had remembered to wish him a happy birthday. And as he'd crossed the school grounds, Graham Peterley had stretched a rope of softened chewing gum over the contraption on Willy's head. It had taken Miss Prestwood, Nurse Graves, and the school caretaker half an hour to disentangle it all.

After hiding his exam results in his school bag, Willy had spent the remainder of the afternoon in the same place he had spent all his afternoons in recent memory – at the soda counter of the Rainbow Candy and Chocolates Shoppe, using leftover 10p coins to buy something he could drink through an extra-long straw, one that would reach between the bars of his headwear. He didn't really care about the milkshakes and soda pops – what he really wanted was the taffy, and that he just couldn't risk – but he had to buy something in order to stay in the shop, and staying in the shop was his primary goal. The old man who owned the shop had chased him off the first few times, but he had persisted, and eventually the elderly confectioner had relented and allowed the little boy to stay at the counter – sometimes for hours – plying him with questions about why tempered chocolate looked shiny and wet, or how to tell the difference between French, Swiss, and Italian meringues. And today, on his eleventh birthday, Willy had asked the old man some very particular questions he had been meaning to ask for weeks, and he had come to a decision.

"No son of mine is going to be a chocolatier."

There was a clap of thunder just over Frith Hill behind him as Willy remembered his father's pronouncement, and he sighed around his orthodonture. In retrospect, he should perhaps have waited until he'd finished secondary school to tell his father what he had decided that day at the Rainbow soda counter. He had no intentions of going to university or becoming any sort of doctor as his father expected; he really had no great desire to go on even to secondary school either, come to think of it. But of course he couldn't just go and become a candy maker at the age of eleven, whatever his desire, and so he supposed he would have to attend at least secondary school, until he was of legal age. And yes, now that he had sat under this tree and thought about it, he realized that it probably would have done better to just have said nothing until he was older.

But it was his eleventh birthday, and once again, his father had prepared him a plain, flavorless, sugarless bun for his birthday cake, and he supposed he had simply snapped.

"Candy is a waste of time. No son of mine is going to be a chocolatier."

His father had followed him out of the kitchen into the hall as he pronounced those words, squeezing his rubber exam gloves compulsively as he always did when something didn't go his way. He had presented the bun on a saucer from his late wife's best china, looking at Willy as though he expected the boy to bounce with elation at the generous gift. He had told Willy that after he had eaten his birthday bun, they would discuss what secondary school he wanted to attend – something his father said was very important, as it could determine what universities he had a choice of. Willy had neglected to blow out the single candle propped in the center of the tasteless bun, and instead had looked up at his father and told him that he had decided to open a candy shop when he left school. The argument that followed had been the worst in Willy's eleven years of memory.

"Why on earth would you want to do that?" his father had chuckled, still waiting for him to blow out the candle, and Willy had seen that he did not think his son was being serious.

"Because candies make me happy," he had answered honestly, realizing as he said it that as far as his father knew, he had never eaten any candy – and that his father was not exactly interested in whether anyone in the world was happy or not. "They make other people happy too," he had plowed on. "And I've got all these ideas in my head about new candies that nobody has ever made before. I'm good at science, and that's really what making candy – what making anything – is all about, when you come down to it."

"What candy is all about is cavities," his father had grumbled.

"Well, then I'll be keeping you in business," Willy had said sharply, which was, of course, a mistake. There followed the largest row Willy had ever had the misfortune to be a part of, with Willy's extollations of the virtues of chocolate being drowned out by his father's weighty declarations of its pointlessness until the candle in the unwanted bun had burned down to a nub. They argued until Willy's jaws were tired from pushing out all of those words around the wires and brackets that encased his mouth. He felt like a budgie who'd gotten his beak stuck in the mesh of his cage.

"Candy is a waste of time. No son of mine is going to be a chocolatier," his father pronounced as they came into the front hall, and Willy could tell that he meant that to be the final word on it. And in that moment, Willy had realized something that he had not thought of before – that it could easily be the final word on it. Children, Willy had thought to himself, were little more than budgies to adults. They were pretty little things who lived in cages and sang and fluttered for the amusement of the adults who kept them, and under no circumstances were they permitted to behave in any un-budgie-like ways, or to leave the confines of their small environments. Some people, of course, let their budgies out of their cages to fly about the house; but some budgies saw nothing in their whole lives but the view from their perch, overlaid by the grey grid of their cage. Willy understood that his father had put his head inside a cage of its own, not only in reality but symbolically, and that he would put Willy's whole body into a cage if he could find half an excuse to do it. His father could control what secondary school he went to next term, could determine where he went to university; he could keep Willy from secondary school altogether and teach him at home. He could stop him going out to the Rainbow Shoppe, could ensure that he never had a friend or an adventure or, indeed, that he never again left their little grey row house. Until he was a grown man, he would be a budgie in his father's grey cage, and he did not like this idea one bit.

"Then I'll run away," he had said flatly, "to Switzerland… Bavaria… the candy capitals of the world." It was a childish threat that he did not mean until it had fully left his mouth, but once the words were out he found that he did mean it – even if he had very little idea of how he would accomplish such a thing.

"Go ahead. But I won't be here when you come back." His father had looked far more confident in that statement than Willy had felt in his own, but Willy had reached up to the hook and taken down his school bag defiantly, throwing it on and marching out the door of the grey row house into an equally grey afternoon.

He had gotten on the train and was halfway to the next town before his anger began to wear off and he thought to check his schoolbag to see what he had actually brought with him. It was dismally empty; a change of clothes, a balled-up paper that was probably exam study notes, his small candy notebook and broken pencil, and a package of grape Pop Rocks he had forgotten he had. This was not an encouraging start to a life of world travel. It cost more to ride the train than Willy had thought, and by the time they pulled into Amersham station, he had counted the little stash of coins in his schoolbag's front pocket and realized that he did not have enough money to go even to London, much less around the world. In the end, he found himself aimlessly puttering about Amersham village looking for something to do. This town had no candy shop, or if it had, he could not find it on the high street, and by supper time he had come across nothing interesting except the village museum. It was a small thing filled mostly with bits of Tudor-era chamber pots the locals had dug up in their gardens, but in one corridor he found a display of flags from countries around the world. Willy walked up and down this corridor all afternoon, imagining what it might have been like to travel to all of these places, to eat strange and exotic sweets in foreign markets and unfamiliar shops; he stopped only when the night watchman came in at sunset and told him that they were closing for the night. Willy had just enough money left to ride the last train back to his own village, and he supposed he had no other choice but to go home and hope his father would not mock his failed attempt at freedom.

Of course, when he had gotten home, it was no longer there.

In the yew tree above Willy's head, an owl hooted mournfully as if in sympathy with his plight. The little boy thought it was quite odd for an owl to be out and about when a storm was about to blow in over the churchyard; most sensible creatures got themselves in out of the rain, if they had anywhere to get to. Perhaps, like him, this owl had nowhere to go but this churchyard tree. Perhaps he had flown home to his nest only to find that some other owl had picked it up in its talons and carried it away to some unknown tree elsewhere. It would not be the first home that had vanished that evening.

Willy had got off the train just as the first storm clouds had begun to paint grey over the colors of sunset, and had walked very slowly indeed down High Street toward Church Lane. He had been looking down at his feet as he walked, listening to the distant thunder and generally feeling sorry for himself, and so he had not noticed anything amiss until he was directly across from his row house on the opposite pavement. He had looked up to check for any oncoming cars and had found that his house was not there.

Willy had stared. The house was not demolished; it had not been blown up in a gas explosion, or burned down by a fire; it had not fallen in on itself or been bulldozed, or been covered or hidden. It was simply not there. There was a house-sized gap in the row of identical houses, as if a giant had come along and taken it up like taking a box of breakfast cereal from a shelf in a market. The lights were still on in the neighbors' houses, and in one window he could see the silhouette of Mrs. Adams calmly reading her book in her high-backed chair. Nobody was crowding onto the street to see what had happened to the missing house. There was no fire brigade or police constable come to investigate. Not even nosy Mrs. Tait, who spent most of her time watching neighbors out of her windows, appeared to be interested. In fact, Willy got the impression that absolutely nobody on the street even knew that his house was missing at all. And it was this fact that made Willy understand what had happened.

His father had vanished the house by magic.

Willy was not nearly as surprised as the average eleven-year-old boy would be at this notion. He was surprised that his father had followed through on his threat, of course; but he was not at all surprised that his father had vanished a house. It was unexpected, because his father so rarely did anything of the sort – at least, not in front of Willy. But it did not make Willy gape in awe and wonder, for of course, Willy had always known that his father could do magic when he really wanted to. His mother had told him when he was a very little boy all about how his father, and his grandfather, and all the other grandfathers before that, were all wizards who could do wonderful magic. They had gone to a school for wizards, and some of his uncles had even used magic to fight in the War. Naturally, he had thought these were fairy tales until the day he had peeked into his father's office and watched him fix Elbert Dover's teeth by magic. Elbert's teeth had been truly horrendous, and after that Willy's father had become the most sought-after dentist in the whole Chiltern area. Willy did not think his father did magic very often, as on the few occasions he had asked him about it his father had become very surly indeed; but Willy suspected that there would have been no fixing Mr. Dover's teeth in any ordinary way and so his father had resorted to drastic measures. Willy had always been rather disappointed that he himself did not appear to be magic too, although this seemed to please his father somehow. But whether he liked to use it or not, his father was magic, and if anyone needed any more proof, they need only look at the empty space where Willy's house had been only hours before.

Of course, by the nature of magic, Willy doubted anyone walking down the street could see the results of his father's spell any more than they would notice a speck of bird droppings on a windowsill twenty feet above their head. That was one question his father had answered – non-magical people were always oblivious to things going on around them, magic or otherwise.

And so, Willy had stood alone on the pavement and stared at where his house had been, looking at it almost in a trance until a loud clap of thunder roused him. His father had said that he wouldn't be there when he came back; if Willy had done as he'd planned, gone travelling, seen the world, opened his shop and come back years later as a grown man, that would have been an understandable thing to say. Perhaps not a happy thing, but understandable. As he had only been gone about five hours, however, it did seem a bit of an overreaction. If he were magic like his father, he supposed he could use some sort of spell to find where his father had taken off to. Actually, he supposed he could do that anyway, magic or no magic, if he walked around the village long enough. He didn't expect his father to abscond all the way to, for instance, Canterbury, or Devon. Most likely he'd have put the house down somewhere close enough he could still get his post without too much bother. But what would Willy do if he found him? Stumble in, exhausted from searching and hungry because he'd missed supper, eat the bun on the table that would now be stale and dripped with candle wax, and then watch his father sit in silence until he heard the apology he was waiting for?

Not a chance, thought Willy. At least, definitely not tonight.

Maybe he would stay away for a few days, just long enough for his father to stop being angry and start being worried. Long enough to show him that Willy was not a budgie in a cage. It had seemed like a good plan in general, but the low banks of dark clouds rolling toward town were now pulsing with lightning, and so Willy had pulled his schoolbag back into place on his shoulder and set off in search of some place to sleep that was out of the rain.

He had walked the entire High Street before he realized that it was bedtime for most of the people in this little village; all the shops were closed, the gates to the playground and the schoolyard were locked, and the closest YMCA was several villages away in Wycombe. And after some thought, Willy realized that the only place he was likely to get in at this hour was the parish church. So, he had set his face determinedly and begun the long walk down the heavily tree-shaded Church Lane, with the gathering thunderstorm following stealthily along behind him. It would have been a pleasant stroll, if he was not so very hungry and tired. He came out some time later from the dark tunnel of trees and crossed the crumbling bridge to St. Peter and Paul, hoping that a church caretaker was still about who might give him a blanket and let him sleep in a pew.

When he got to the steps, however, he saw there was a note tacked to the church door. It read:

CHURCH IS NOW CLOSED AFTER DARK. We have had some problems with thieves of late and have decided to lock the church at sunset. We hope parishioners will not be inconvenienced and can find other places for quiet prayer. APOLOGIES.

The wind whipped the corners of the note up and down as Willy read it a second time. That was just his luck, he supposed. He had stood there for several minutes on the steps of the church, trying to decide what to do next. He was hungry, he wanted to go to sleep, and most of all he wanted to go back to that morning and do his whole birthday over again. This was, all things considered, the worst birthday he had ever had. Dejected, he had finally made the trek through the churchyard and up to the yew tree. There was a bench beneath it, and he thought that perhaps if he slept beneath the bench, the combination of the seat and the tree's thick foliage might be enough to keep him dry when the rain finally came.

And an hour later, he was still sat beneath the tree, cataloguing his bad birthdays and watching the rain begin draping over the far side of town like a gauzy curtain in the distance. As he could see no way of getting any supper, he dug the crumpled package of Pop Rocks out of his bag and tore it open, contemplating how he was going to pour the candy into his mouth around his orthodonture bars.

THWAP.

Willy felt something land on his head, and for a moment he thought that the rain had finally arrived; then an object slipped down from the top of his orthodonture and fell into his lap.

It was an envelope.

Willy looked up in surprise to see where it had come from. The owl he had heard hooting a few minutes before was now visible in the lower branches and was gazing squarely down at him, fixing him with large round eyes which told him in no uncertain terms that the envelope had been dropped on him intentionally. Before he had time to wonder what an owl had been doing with an envelope, the bird opened its large speckled wings and took to the air, winging away from the town toward the north.

Curious, Willy turned back to the envelope in his lap.

It was heavy, made of some sort of thick paper like the kind used for school awards, and he could tell it had more than one piece of paper inside it. There was some kind of wax seal holding it shut, although in the rapidly diminishing moonlight, Willy could not see it in detail. He turned it over in his hands to read the address.

Mr. W. Wonka

The Yew Tree

St. Peter and Paul's on Church Lane

Great Missenden

Buckinghamshire

Willy read the lines twice over to be sure he was not misunderstanding. For an absurd moment, he thought perhaps it might be a birthday card. But who would be sending him a card? Certainly not his father; and he had no school friends. It might be Miss Prestwood; but why would it come from an owl and not in the post? He supposed one might train an owl the way they trained pigeons in the War. But why would Miss Prestwood have trained owls? And how would she (or anyone else) know that he was at this moment sat under the yew tree in the churchyard? He read the address through again, noting that whoever had written it had forgotten to put the post code at the bottom – probably an old person, he guessed, as the post codes had only been used for a few years now and old people were always forgetting them. But of course, he amended, why would an owl need a post code anyway?

There was another clap of thunder, this time closer, and Willy reckoned he ought to open the card and read it before he got it rained on. He thumbed open the seal quickly and dumped the contents into his lap. It was not a card, as it turned out, but a letter that appeared to be two pages long. When he unfolded this letter, a smaller note-card sized paper fell out from between the folds to land on the grass between his legs. He ignored that for the moment and began to read the letter. It said:

HOGWARTS SCHOOL of WITCHCRAFT and WIZARDRY

Headmaster: Albus Dumbledore

(Order of Merlin, First Class, Grand Sorc., Chf. Warlock,
Supreme Mugwump, International Confed. of Wizards)

Dear Mr. Wonka,

We are pleased to inform you that you have been accepted at Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry. Please find enclosed a list of all necessary books and equipment.

Term begins on 1 September. We await your owl by no later than 31 July.

Yours sincerely,

Minerva McGonagall,

Deputy Headmistress

Willy put down the papers and stared blankly at them, looking stunned for the second time that evening. A school for wizards? he thought wildly. He remembered his mother telling him that such a place existed, and that his father had attended there, but he had never thought to see any proof of it, especially on paper.

"I didn't even apply," he whispered to himself, and then jumped at the sound of his own voice in the quiet. He thought that these school people would be quite disappointed when they discovered that he was not magic like his father, but he supposed there was nothing for it but to tell them. He assumed that owl who had dropped the letter on his head would come back tomorrow for his answer, and he was glad he had a pencil in his schoolbag. He looked to see if the second paper was a blank sheet for his reply, but it was not; he held it up in a patch of moonlight and saw that it was the aforementioned list of school books and uniform requirements. It was a long list, and Willy sighed. Even if he had been magic and wasn't currently sleeping under a tree, his father would never pay for all of that. He would be lucky if his father would pay for a non-magic school instead of just sending him to the state one.

Putting aside the letter and the list, Willy now reached down and picked up the small note card that had fallen from between them. The handwriting here was less regular and formal, although obviously written by the same person who had signed the letter. Willy held the short note up into the last available bit of moonlight filtering through the tree and read:

Mr. Wonka,

Ordinarily you would have been sent this letter later in June, but as it has come to our attention that you are in a bit of a situation, we were moved to act sooner rather than later.

Please meet me at your village train station tomorrow morning, and I will find you a place to stay until the start of term. Since you likely have nowhere to sleep tonight, I have enclosed a few items to help you along.

M.M.

Willy turned the card over, but that was the extent of the message. He sighed. He didn't know how anyone knew about his "situation" – magic, he supposed when he had thought about it – and he appreciated the sentiment; but he could only hope that this McGonagall woman still wanted to find him a place once she realized he was not magic. He also appreciated her desire to help him in a more immediate way, but the only things that had fallen from the envelope were the three papers, so he was not sure what she meant by "a few items to help him along." Perhaps she had intended to put in some money for a room at the pub, but had forgotten? Willy shrugged. He pushed the three papers into his schoolbag and opened the empty envelope a little wider, in case he'd missed something.

It was almost too dark for him to see it, but a few moments later there was a great smack of lightning somewhere away on Frith Hill, and in the second or so of illumination, Willy saw something – a dark square stuck down in the corner of the envelope. He pulled it out cautiously and discovered by the feel of it that it was a little square of silky fabric that had been folded over itself tightly like a flag. Odd, he thought. But… perhaps it was something magic folded up in the cloth? That was the only thing that made any sense, at any rate, and so he began to pick at the corner of the fold with his fingernail. He dug at it until he had freed the corner, and then he held it by its little edge and began to shake it over his open palm.

FWHUMP.

Willy squealed in shock and threw himself backward under the bench as the little piece of cloth gave a great shudder and then flung itself into the air, coming back down to earth as a green tartan plaid tent, complete with stakes that drove themselves effortlessly into the turf of the churchyard. It was not so big as a tent an adult might kip in, but it was just the right size for a small boy burdened only with a schoolbag. Tentatively, Willy reached out and touched it; it was real enough, good solid fabric that felt warm under his hand. If his orthodonture would have allowed it, he would have grinned from ear to ear.

Willy crawled into the tent and found it fully furnished with a sleeping pallet, a pillow, a blanket, a small oil lamp, and – wonder of wonders – a thermos full of hot cocoa and a little tin of Walkers shortbread biscuits. He set into the biscuits immediately, eating them as fast as his braces would allow. The cocoa was exactly the temperature at which one wanted to drink cocoa, and it did not seem to grow colder no matter how long he left the thermos open. He did not know this McGonagall woman, but he was now very sad indeed that he was not magic and would not be going to her school. If this was the kind of magic they did there – the kind that could guarantee the perfect sip of cocoa in every mouthful – then that was a kind of magic he would have been eager to learn.

Willy Wonka checked his watch as he reached for another biscuit, listening to the rain begin in earnest outside his tent. It was half past eleven, which meant that it was still his birthday for another thirty minutes. He sipped the cocoa and nibbled the biscuit, smiling as he imagined a little candle perched on the lid of the biscuit tin. Perhaps, he thought, this would not be his worst birthday after all.