As he moaned in pain, Charlie straightened himself out in his small bed carefully so as to not bump himself on the head again, and thus he no longer faced the hole in the ceiling but the side of his bed leading to the stairs that took him to the floor below. One of the bad things about living in the same attic space he did from when he was a kid was that Charlie often hit his head on the ceiling beams whenever he recklessly got up too fast. Especially in cases such as these when he woke up from a Trogglehumper, what Wonka would call a nightmare, and had no time to regulate his reaction from frightening fantasy to reality. With his hand over his eyes, he saw nothing as he tried to alleviate the pain, but all of that changed the second after he moved his hand down and saw what was in front of him now. There she was at the foot of his bed, Veruca, still a child, like in the nightmare Charlie just woke up from, but far from the polished little lady he wandered throughout the factory with all those years ago. Her face was smudged with dark ash, her hair was all tangled, and she was covered in weeks' worth of factory trash from head to toe. The stench was horrendous, but still not as stomach-churning as her posture and expressions. She had her arms extended towards Charlie with her palms wide open while the bottom portion of her face seemed to be in pure ecstasy. She opened her wide mouth and put on a huge smile, flashing those perfect pearly teeth of hers and accentuating her already well pronounced cheekbones even more. It was the same face Veruca made when she pretended to be a nice little girl for Wonka as her father tried to purchase one of his squirrels for her, and Charlie also thought this must have been what the squirrel she marked to be her pet must have seen before he and the others jumped her. This clearly fake expression of joy had taken up her entire face, well, every part except for her eyes. While her eyes were wide open, like how an exited child's eyes might get, Veruca's eyes had tears coming out of them and running down her cheeks. There was no joy in those eyes, no hope of getting a trained squirrel as a pet, there was only deep trauma in that sea of blue.

Charlie only caught a glimpse of her for a second before the girl with food, wrappings, and other discarded items trapped in her messy hair and on her once luxurious mink coat began to ask in that refined, and rather nasal, child's voice of hers, "Why didn't you save me?"

Veruca then began to approach Charlie with her arms extended, her palms wide open and ready to latch onto him once she got close enough. And it was when that, all of a sudden, Charlie panicked and hid himself under his blanket, rolling up into a fetal position right under his skylight and lied under his blanket like a child spooked during a nighttime thunderstorm. He lied there, frozen in terror at the impossibility he just witnessed, and waiting for whatever that thing was to begin clawing at his back and most likely feast on his soul. But fortunately, nothing laid a single finger on him, and after amassing enough courage to peer beyond the blanket, Charlie carefully turned around and lowered the blanket from his face and was in awe at what he saw; nothing. There was no one standing next to his bed anymore, Veruca was gone. He summoned more courage to move farther away from the skylight and began looking down the side and under his bed and there was nothing there. Charlie knew what he had seen, what he smelt, Veruca was there with him, he was sure of it and he needed to find her. He put on some slippers and climbed down the stairs only to find a house devoid of a stinky little girl wandering about. He then ran outside to the Chocolate Room to investigate and found no signs of anything out of the ordinary.

With no natural explanation for what had just occurred, Charlie came to believe that he must have still been asleep, causing him to repeatedly blurt out, "I must be dreaming, I must be dreaming."

Convinced there was a chance he was still asleep, Charlie rushed over to the side of his house to kick it in order to wake himself up, but once he kicked the shack and all that happened was that he felt a painful, pulsating sensation rush through his right foot, Charlie simply screamed out, "I'm not dreaming, that's real! I'm not dreaming!"

Charlie walked with a limp until he found a spot on the Swudge grass where he could sit down and take off his slipper to examine his foot. For the most part, his foot appeared fine, but he would not be surprised if his big toe turned purple by morning. He now knew he was awake, but that realization did not bring Charlie peace as he knew what he had seen. Veruca was not a little girl anymore, but her child-self was at the foot of Charlie's bed just a few minutes ago. Could his mind be playing tricks on him? Perhaps, but her presence was so real, Charlie could literally smell her. If that encounter was not mind-bending enough, Charlie was not about to forget the nightmare he just woke up from. What are the chances that before a dirty Veruca appeared to Charlie in his room, he would have relived the moment that got her all mangy in the first place? That was an odd question to ask himself, hell, it had been an odd night, but as Charlie though it over he quickly remembered something from the day before which also left him feeling bewildered. The more he replayed the scene of Veruca in his room in his mind, it became clear to Charlie that he had heard her child voice the day before in the Nut Sorting Room.

The voice Charlie heard of Veruca talking to him in his room was the same voice screaming for help from inside the garbage chute. The Veruca that appeared to Charlie had all the trappings of someone who had fallen into a backed-up incinerator, and he was also the only person who heard her speak as the Oompa Loompa on the floor of the room heard nothing. There were just too many parts that fit so perfectly together for all of this to have been a huge coincidence, something was going on. But what was going on exactly? Was Charlie losing his mind? He knew that spending his formative years inside the factory with Wonka had helped in resulting in him growing up to be even more odd and uncomfortable around others than he was when he first moved into the factory, but could he have also picked up the madness which drove Wonka to pursue the impossible? Charlie didn't know if he was going crazy or not, nor did he want to find out, but he couldn't get the image of the young Veruca with that crazed expression, which looked as if she was preparing to lunge at him, out of his head. Nor could Charlie rid that simple question she asked him while she was in front of him out of his head; Why didn't you save me? It was not a question Charlie had an answer for, but it was one that bothered him the more it simmered in his mind.

As Charlie pondered over her words and cross-referenced them with his memories from the tour, he eventually made a startling realization he had somehow not picked up on after all these years, and so he somberly vocalized, "I didn't save her...I didn't save her. How can I go around and let people call me a selfless person when I didn't save her?"

This realization truly his Charlie hard, his entire personality was based around being a good person, but as it turns out he failed to do the right thing at a moment when it truly mattered. Sure, he was paralyzed by fear as he sensed what Veruca was experiencing down below, but even Charlie was not convinced that that was an acceptable excuse. By not doing the right thing, he enabled the squirrels to throw Veruca down the garbage chute and cause lasting damage to her, and what was even worse was that Veruca truly was the only one of the four other Golden Ticket winner whose punishment he could have stopped. Augustus fell in the chocolate river but was out of reach to pull out, and it was not like Charlie had a large lollipop or something for Augustus to grab onto in order to pull him out. Violet was fine for a while as she chewed the Three Course Dinner Chewing Gum, that was until she reached the third course but by then it didn't matter if Charlie pried her mighty jaw open and pulled the gum out with his bare hands, she was still going to suffer the effects of the experimental candy. And as for Mike, he pushed everyone out of the way and bolted so fast to the teleporter that Charlie could have only responded by the time the cynical child was already floating in the containment tube and the disintegrator went off, thus sending him whizzing through the air into the TV. Comparing all those punishments to Veruca's, she spent minutes being under attack from the squirrels and Charlie could have gone down there at any moment to put a stop to it, but he did not.

She was pinned down for a long time and Charlie could have gone down to help but he too was so paralyzed by fear that he could not do anything. As Veruca got swarmed by rodents down below, Charlie the Good Boy did nothing, absolutely nothing. All he did was watch the torture for minutes on end and the only excuse he had for not getting involved was that he froze up, and what kind of response is that? This realization only hurt more the longer he recounted the events of the tour of Wonka's factory and though them through. If he was going to be a hero and save one of the other Golden Ticket winners, it was going to be Veruca as she was the only one who wasn't mean to him throughout the tour. Augustus played that odious prank on Charlie where he got the poor boy's hopes up by pretending to want to share his chocolate, Violet called him a loser, and Mike slammed down his theory about candy, and to an extent, Charlie himself, by calling it all stupid. Veruca was the only Golden Ticket winner who never called him names, who never teased him, nor did she ever give him a dirty look, all the bad things she did that day to the other kids. Sure, she most likely spared Charlie her wrath that day because he was all too easy to ignore and she had even greater targets to take out if she wanted to win the special prize, but the ever-positive-thinking Charlie preferred to believe Veruca just had no hate for him in her heart. Even now that Charlie and Veruca had had a one-on-one encounter that predictably ended rather tense, Charlie chose to believe that it was the alcohol making her so vile against him and not her rotten personality. It was one of Charlie's biggest flaws that he often tried to see the best in people, even when they demonstrated that they didn't deserve it, but he also never gave up hope that others would unleash the good in themselves, and Veruca was no exception.