Sweets to die for: an HP/Charlie & the Chocolate Factory AU
Ten years ago, the war ended, Voldemort disappeared and everyone rejoiced. Shops which had been shut during the last few weeks of the war slowly began opening. People flocked back to their homes on Diagon Alley. Slowly, slowly magical Britain climbed back on to its feet. Two weeks after the war ended, a new store opened on Diagon Alley. Two months later Honeydukes was out of business and no one could get enough of Riddle’s Devilish Delights.
Oh there were some who cautioned against it, because surely a man who claimed his candies were to die for was a dangerous one. It wasn’t natural, the way the children clamoured for his sweets, eating and eating until they were sick and then, when they were done being sick, shrilly demanding Mr Riddle’s sweets. It wasn’t natural either, the way Mr Riddle hid himself from everyone and only had an old house elf do the selling in his store. A man who hid was a man who had secrets and secrets never did anybody any good.
So when the elusive Mr Riddle announced that on the 5th of August 1991 he would let five lucky children, with one guardian, into the place where all the magic happened provided they find the golden tickets he’d hidden away in his infamous chocolate bars, magical Britain wasted no time emptying their pockets for all the chocolate they could buy.
And no one remembered the words printed just below Riddle’s Devilish Delights.
Gregory Goyle was the first to find a golden ticket. Unsurprising. The boy worked his way through twenty chocolate bars a day without falling sick. Unsurprising too, that he nearly drowned in Mr Riddle’s chocolate river.
Well, at least they didn’t mince him into candy bars.
Pansy Parkinson found one through sheer willpower. She was that kind of girl – the kind who grows up to be called ‘a force of nature’ and other unpleasant things. At eleven, she, very simply, was a snob: arrogant and precocious and determined to get her own way.
Oh boy did she get her own way. She swelled up so big, she filled the whole room, which was about right. They had to cart her out and squeeze all the juices out of her – and some of her pride too.
At least she had her head screwed on the right way round when she got out.
Draco Malfoy was mortified that he was the third to find the ticket and not the first, despite the army of house elves tirelessly unwrapping chocolate bars all day and all night in their wine cellar. He was the golden boy, after all. Magical Britain’s most precious son. Well, pureblood magical Britain’s most precious son at any rate.
Not that he ever let them forget it. Not when nearly all his sentences began with the phrase “My father will…” and Lucius Malfoy almost always did. Little Draco always got his way and well, if he didn’t, then his father would hear about it.
Just like he did with the golden ticket. Just like he did with the goose which laid the golden egg.
Draco Malfoy, the golden boy, was weighed and found impure. A bad egg through and through. Down little Draco went, to the place where all the garbage found its way, and down Lucius Malfoy went, in pursuit of his precious son and the hope of all of pureblood magical Britain.
In the end, they came out all the better for having that near brush with death in the fiery incinerators of Mr Riddle’s chocolate workshop.
Zacharias Smith loathed chocolates in the same way he loathed not knowing things. He was a strong believer in the art of rational thought, so while everyone else ate themselves sick (or employed house elves to do their work for them), Zacharias Smith sat down and methodically calculated creation dates, expiry dates and all kinds of different probabilities and scored a golden ticket with one careful purchase. He meant business. Mr Riddle had a secret and he, Zacharias Smith, was going to discover it and tell the whole bloody wizarding world just what a sham Mr Riddle was.
Odd, for a wizard to have so little faith in all the myriad possibilities of magic. Magic was the stuff of dreams. If you could think it you could do it and Mr Riddle did.
Well, at least he learnt his lesson before he had all his imagination stamped out of him.
(Being atomized, shrunk and sent through the air into a muggle television set tends to have that effect on people.)
Mr Riddle turns to the last child with a smile. His chocolate bar had been a birthday present. Dear old Hagrid. Pure coincidence, of course, that golden ticket. The fates have such a strange way of playing with the lives of men, after all. Tom Marvolo Riddle knows that.
Oh he knows it all too well.
Mr Riddle’s voice is cold and unpleasant and snakelike and Hagrid is nowhere in sight.
Harry Potter, the Boy Who Lived, now come to die.
Insp. by propertyofregulus
kianamaiart
snowghoul
gummygunk
discoholicmusic
titsay
