Chapter Two! I have decided that there will be seven chapters of this story in all, quite a number for a story in a crossover fandom that appeals to three and a half people and a shoelace, but I can't help it. This story has taken on a life of its own, outside my control. So for you three and a half people, enjoy!

When Eric wakes from his nap, the sun is already low in the sky. Briefly, he wonders if the entire encounter in the cemetery was nothing more than a dream. It certainly had a dreamlike quality to it. But then he puts his hand into his pocket and feels the sharp edges of the card Widget gave him. He seeks out the corners and they dig into his fingertips, little pinpricks of almost-pain that prove that this afternoon was real.

Grinning, he launches himself off his bed, grabbing a newsboy cap on his way out the door. "I'm going out to meet some friends," he says to his mother as he passes through the kitchen. "I don't know what time I'll be home. Late, probably. Don't wait up."

His mother's eyes light up the way they still do whenever he talks about doing things with friends. "Have fun," she calls after him. "Be safe."

Eric strolls to the back corner of Central Park. It's slower than he wants to move - he wants to run, to sprint, to get there as quickly as he can. But it's August in New York, and he prefers not to spend his evening drenched in sweat.

His heart quickens as he nears the circus, adrenaline and anticipation filling his veins. The wrought iron above the gate is lit up, old-fashioned incandescent light bulbs that burn orangey-red rather than white spelling out Le Cirque des Reves. The Circus of Dreams. He looked it up at home. The name itself sends the kind of shivers down his spine that no place but the Wonder Emporium has ever done.

Eric buys his ticket, much cheaper than he had expected for such an attraction in New York City, and joins the line waiting to enter through a heavy striped curtain. He's giddy, almost, with excitement. He doesn't know what to expect, and that is a rare feeling. School is school, unchanging and monotonous, home is home, familiar and solid, and the Emporium is the Emporium, bursting at the seams with unpredictability, yes, but an expected unpredictability. This is something different. He hadn't realized how badly he apparently needed different.

When his turn arrives, he steps through the curtain with his eyes closed, and when he opens them, his breath catches in his throat, for it is as if the circus and the noise and the crowd have all disappeared, and he is alone in friendly darkness, surrounded by stars. Slowly, full of wonder, he moves forward, navigating the tunnel's gentle twists and turns with care. Distantly familiar constellations pass him as he walks, pictures he remembers from long-ago campouts and field trips to planetariums, rather than from more recent personal experiences. He does, after all, live in the city that never sleeps.

The tunnel is impressive and intriguing, to be sure, but he is far more interested in what it is leading him to. So when he arrives at a velvet curtain, he does not linger amidst the stars, but reaches out with one hand and pushes the curtain aside.

The sights and sounds of the circus surround him at once, a joyous and joy-filled cacophony of movement and music and laughter and something else that he can't place, and he feels full to the brim with wonder and amazement and again, that something else.

It's just like coming into the toy store.

The thought blooms into his mind, but once it is there, the breath he took before pushing aside the velvet curtain (was it only seconds ago?) leaves him slowly, on a long and soft exhale, and without intending to, he smiles. This place, this Circus of Dreams, feels just like the store, or at least, what the store could grow into, given the chance.

No, he amends almost immediately. Not what it could grow into. What it would be already if it had been built for adults instead of children.

It is the strangest thing in the world, but somehow, stepping into this place he's never before been feels distinctly like coming home.

Someone jostles him, shaking him out of his reverie and reminding him why he is here in the first place. He decides to walk the entire length of the circus before entering any of the tents. It allows him to soak it all in, the atmosphere, the ambiance, and besides, the action is familiar and natural. He circles the Emporium like this every day, watching the finger-painting and puppet shows without necessarily joining in.

The Circus of Dreams is not made up of different rings inside a single tent, like the circus he visited once when he was eight. Rather, the tents here are too numerous to count, the walkways between them circling and looping together, past pathside performances and exhibitions of contortionists, jugglers, and living statues. He lingers by some of these, catching the middles and ends of acts, but for the most part, he wanders steadily, just taking everything in.

Eventually, he finds himself outside a tent he has passed many times so far this evening, on his circuitous wandering path. Written in the Stars, proclaims the sign upon the tent. A Different Kind of Fortune Telling.

Fortune telling. Normally, Eric doesn't hold with such things. But he can't quite bring himself to walk past again. The sign keeps drawing his eyes, and a voice in his head speaks up, saying that if anyone can help him figure out what to do about his life and future at a magical toy store, it might very well be a fortune teller at a magical circus. And a magical fortune teller, the voice argues further, is likely quite different from the ordinary sort. So he enters the tent.

There is a short line, so he takes a seat in a spindly black chair. Everything within the circus is black, black or white, so much so that Eric, in his blue hoodie and green-patterned newsie cap, feels noticeably out of place. While it is true that all of the color comes from the guests, there seems to be some sort of widely understood rule to limit that color to red. Eric wishes he'd known.

When the fortune teller emerges from from behind her glass bead curtain to usher the next patron in, her eyes catch on Eric - or at least, he thinks they do. She's veiled, so it's hard to tell, but she does seem to look at him for a long moment before she turns and leads someone else to the back of the tent. He'd think nothing of it, except that each time she reemerges, it happens again.

Eventually, he is the only one left in the tent, and when she appears to lead him to her table, she makes a detour, walking with purpose for the entrance and hanging a sign beside the tent's opening. Then she turns to face him. "Come with me, Eric," she says.

He shows no surprise when she calls him by name. Indeed, he feels no real surprise. Even if it is magic and not Widge telling the people of his circus that Eric might be wandering about tonight, it is a kind of magic he saw all too often from Mr. Magorium. Mr. Magorium knew the name of every child and once-child who walked through the door of the Emporium long before they were ever introduced. And Mahoney has come to be the same. Hell, Eric himself has been there long enough that sometimes he thinks he has the trick of it, sometimes he looks at a child a thinks, I'll bet you're a Tracy, moments before a harried mother reveals that, yes, Tracy is indeed the child's name. And Eric isn't magical in the slightest. So if this fortune teller wants to impress him, she will have to reveal knowledge of him far beyond just his name.

She seems almost to know his unspoken challenge as they sit, or at least the smile he can discern behind her veil hints that she might. He waits for her to pull out a deck of cards or a crystal ball or ask for his palm at the very least, but instead she reveals a small handful of sparkling stones, black and white and silver, like tiny diamonds. In one graceful movement, she casts them across the velvet covered table where they sit, winking and twinkling up at them like stars in a rich black sky.

He watches the edge of her veil ripple as she exhales on a long breath. She nods, then looks up at him. "I knew when I saw you in the chamber," she says. "You can only be Widge's friend. Tell me, Eric. How do you like the circus?"

"I thought fortune tellers were the ones providing the answers," he says with a raised eyebrow.

"Well, I am not an ordinary fortune teller. And you are not an ordinary fortune tellee." As if to emphasize this, she reaches up and removes the veil from her face, revealing eyes of shocking blue and hair of shocking red.

"And you, I think," Eric says, slightly breathless with the sudden recognition, "can only be Widge's sister."

The fortune teller's face splits into a grin. "He told you about me?" she asks.

"No," Eric confesses. "But there's no one else you could be."

"The hair gives it away, right?" she asks with a twinkle in her eye and a laugh edging its way around the words.

"That, and . . . there's just no one else you could be." He doesn't know how to explain it any better than that, but it's like knowing the names in the toy store. He looks at her, and he sees Widget, not in her appearance or any sort of physical resemblance (though that is there as well, in spades), but in her essence. He can't explain it, it's never happened to him like this before, but he knows she is Widget's sister as certainly as he knows that her hair is red.

Her eyes narrow, considering him, and it takes him straight back to the cemetery this afternoon. Her gaze weighs and measures just like her brother's, and it is as strange a feeling now as it was then.

"Eric," she says suddenly, "if Widge didn't tell you about me, then he didn't tell you my name. But do you know what it is?"

"I - no. I - don't." She's meant to be a fortune teller, not a mind reader! he thinks, startled that her question so echoes the thoughts of knowing names that he just had. But it's not a lie. He doesn't know her name. He doesn't always, in the store, and he isn't always right when he does know. All he sees when he looks at her is her connection to Widge.

To his surprise, she reaches out over the table then, careful to keep her arm and her sleeve from disturbing the star stones strewn below. Answering her unspoken request almost involuntarily, he slowly reaches out and offers his hand. "Close your eyes," she says softly as she takes his hand in hers. "Do you know it now?"

He breathes her in and tries to focus on the feeling of her hand in his, and when he breathes out, a name comes with the breath. "Poppet," he says, certain, and his eyes open. "Except that that's not really your name, is it? Any more than Widget's is Widget."

"Widget's name is Widget," Poppet corrects, withdrawing her hand. "Our parents named him Winston, but what does that matter in the scheme of things? Our parents named me Penelope, but my name is Poppet. Well seen."

She's shaken him, this young woman who is not as young as she appears. Trying to regain some feeling of control, he comments, "This is the strangest fortune telling I've ever had done," and she laughs.

"Come now, Eric, it's the only fortune telling you've ever had done. You don't hold with such things. But we can return to the fortune telling, if you wish. Let me consult your stars." And she slips back into the fortune telling guise that she had seemingly left behind. She watches and considers the stone on the table top for a long moment before glancing back up at him. "Do you want to know?" she asks. "I know you are anxious about the future, uncertain of how things will work out for you, but I also know that you're terrified of hearing it because you know the possibility exists that it won't work out the way you want. All of which is complicated by the fact that you don't really know what you want."

He doesn't like how he reacts to those words. He doesn't like how exposed he feels, hearing her voice thoughts he's barely voiced to himself. He shouldn't have come in here in the first place. "Are you a fortune teller or a mind reader?" The words are much more defensive than he wants them to be. She smiles softly at him, sympathy shining out of her eyes.

"They're the same thing, a lot of the time. Do you want to know?"

He looks at her, then at the table, at those false stars winking up at them, showing her glimpses of his life and hopes and fears and dreams that he isn't sure he wants anyone else to see if he doesn't even know what they are.

"No," he says suddenly, making a decision and pushing away from the table. "I don't."

She holds his eyes for one heartbeat, then nods and sweeps the stones together into her hand, erasing their patterns from the table, though he can't help but feel that whatever she saw hasn't been erased from her mind.

"That's wisdom in its own right, honestly," she tells him as she puts the stones away in a little pouch. "I can't tell you how many people regret the future once they've heard it, for I don't play at this. I don't tell people the vague reassurances they want to hear. I tell them truly what the stars hold. Though I also tell them that no future is written in stone, and that the stars fall differently every time. They don't seem reassured by that, however. Are you?"

Eric thinks about the question for a moment. "Maybe," he finally says, feeling a bit more like himself, less rattled. Poppet's fortune telling may have unsettled him, but Poppet herself is very good at having a soothing presence. He wonders if that's deliberate, taken on because she knows that her kind of fortune telling is unsettling, or if she is that way all on her own. A bit of both is most likely, he decides. "Yes," he says then, amending his hesitation. "I suppose there's some comfort to be had in the idea that nothing is really inevitable, that you always have the choice, but at the same time . . . well, if things were inevitable, then there's less weighing on our shoulders."

"Oh, I never said nothing was inevitable," she informs him then with an apologetic smile. "Some things are. The future is complicated, Eric. Some things are inevitable, but they are the only things written in stone. Like towns on a map. The paths we take to get to them are up to us. The paths we take away from them are up to us. And all those different possibilities, those change the map in thousands of different ways, do you see? We are not what happens to us. We are what we do with what happens to us. Does that make sense?"

Eric considers the idea for a long moment, weighing the thought in his mind. "It doesn't not make sense," he eventually acknowledges, a statement that makes her laugh.

"Well put," she tells him with a grin. "And now, Eric Applebaum, I have a gift for you."

"For me?" he asks, surprised. "Why?"

"Because I like you. And because I know my brother. My gift to you is this: I will allow you to exit my tent through the back, and then I will spend the rest of the circus distracting Widge so that he doesn't track you down and drag you around tonight. He will, otherwise, you know. He will say that it is tradition, and I will remind him that once does not establish tradition, and also that you are not Bailey, and I will even go so far as to tell him that the stars have told me that you would do better to explore the circus for yourself tonight, before he sucks you into his whirlwind of enthusiasm."

You're one to talk about someone else's whirlwind of enthusiasm, Eric thinks, and from the look on her face, Poppet has guessed his thoughts.

"I realize little of that made any sense to you," she says then, "but the long and short of it is, unless you decide to seek us out, the circus is yours to explore tonight on your own. Tomorrow, I shall not be able to keep Widget from your side, but by then, I think you shall be ready for it."

"Do you involve yourselves this personally in every patron's experience?" Eric asks her, knowing the answer before she speaks it.

"Of course not. If we did, we'd accomplish little else."

"Then why me?" There are layers beneath the question, and Poppet seems to pick out every one. She gives him one of her soft, unfathomable smiles.

"Because you are not like every other patron," she tells him. "Most patrons do not have sparks of magic in their souls, Eric. Or think of a place they've never been before as home." She holds his eyes for a moment more, then smiles and leads him to a back flap. She holds it open for him, and he steps through, but before he can disappear, she catches him by the hand. "Find wonder, Eric. And fare well."

He glances down at his hand as she lets it go, and when he looks up again, she is gone.

To be continued. Please consider leaving a review.