Wow, thank you for all the reviews, everyone! It seems this story got really popular on Saturday.

I have to announce that I won't be updating until this Friday. I'm celebrating my birthday on Wednesday and won't be near a computer, so once again I will be messing up my every-other-day update schedule. As an early forgiveness present, there's a bonus being uploaded with this chapter!

This chapter: the title doesn't mean what you think it means. Really.

Beyond the Winding Road

By Emori Loul

Advance XIII: ~Twist~

The sprinklers in the left wing began going off before he could finish pruning the dead flower heads, soaking the back of his light cotton button-up as he crouched over the dirt beds on his knees. He didn't really have a problem with it though—decades of paperwork and secret politics had made him miss the simple days of helping Ada ready the flower garden for her stuffed animal picnics and birthday surprises for Oz. Despite Richard and Beatrix's insistence that he didn't need to help, he liked the peaceful mood of the little glass flower shop. Whenever things inside the Tale household became too stressful—which they had been, for the last few days, now that the elder Lymans were staying somewhere in Carillon—Le Panier de Fleurs was a nice respite from the chaos.

His current favorite flowers in inventory were the sweet pea blossoms climbing the trellises in bed 34, which had bloomed just after his arrival. But right now, he was taking care of the golden roses, whose patch for some reason had begun wilting around the edges. An added benefit of this was that most people saw him as occupied and were leaving him alone to his work and thoughts.

All except one.

"Excuse me, young man," asked a cragged old voice for the thirty-fifth time in four days.

Gilbert sighed anxiously and sat up, brushing some dirt off his sleeves and onto his black apron. "Yes?"

"Have we met before?"

"Probably, Mr. West."

"Hmm…" the man inspected him. "Aren't you the man always around Oz? Yes, got to protect him from that terrorizer, she's here far too much for my liking…"

"Mr. West, do you know where Missus Hektor is? I'm sure she'd love to hear all about this…" He glanced away towards the door, relief flooding him at the now-familiar figure.

"Oh no. She keeps taking me away from my work! How is anyone supposed to run a business with her around?" Unknowing of the woman approaching him from behind, he went on, "It's all those years in Idvitz, really. Aemelia says there's trouble brewing over there now; might break out in riots soon."

"A little too late for 'might,' Phillipe." Mrs. Hektor grabbed the back of his wheelchair and began turning him towards the main body of the shop.

"Really?" replied Mr. West's hoarse voice, quieter as he grew further away. "Well, it's about time for those Morts to do something stupid again."

Gilbert shook his head, putting down his floral shears and smothering his face with his one hand, before picking up the clippers and attempting to get back to work. But if he thought he'd finally earned his peace, he'd be wrong.

"That HARRIDAN!" SLAM, and the door to the west wing of the greenhouse vibrated on its hinges. At this he dropped the shears in surprise, turning quickly to see Oz's mother burst into the wing.

"Are you alright, Mrs. Tale?"

"No!" Beatrix stormed over to him and stole a spade off the ground near his knees, then headed over to a workbench covered in tiny pots and bags of unpotted seeds. Tearing viciously into the dirt, she dug a hole slightly larger than necessary into the first patch of soil and pressed the seeds in somewhat harder than usual.

Gilbert watched all this with a kind of horrified fascination—in his four days since returning to the Tale household, he'd never seen Oz's new mother be anything but gracious and nurturing.

"Is there… anything you'd like to talk about?"

In reply the small blonde woman made a sound like an angry squirrel and jabbed the dirt with the spade like a sabre, huffing loudly in frustration. She then closed her eyes, tilted her head back and breathed deeply.

"I'm okay… I'm okay."

When she opened her eyes again, Gilbert had gotten up and grabbed her by the right hand, pressing lightly against her as if trying to keep her from falling over.

She sighed. "I'm sorry for worrying you. I… I think I'm good now. Really."

He let go, but didn't go back to pruning. He remained standing next to her and watched quietly as she continued (more gently) to fill the individual soil pots with seeds, applying a little water here and there to get them going.

"…where's Al…Edith?" he asked quietly.

Beatrix exhaled deeply through her nose. "Edith's up in her room, responding to a couple messages and blasting some history podcast at top volume." She worried her lip. "Apparently some guy she calls Pigeon sent her some pretty panicked emails about something going down in Idvitz? She's quite upset about it."

Gilbert nodded, though Beatrix wasn't looking. "The riots are spreading," he mused quietly, almost to himself. "She's probably worried it'll start moving towards wherever it is she lives."

Beatrix tsk'd. "You know, I'm not one to agree with the angry fusspots on the news, but that country's an utter mess right now. No offense meant or anything—" she said, looking at him in quick concern, "—But if I'd have known about those riots a week earlier, I would have never let Oz anywhere near there."

Gilbert understood, but he was glad she hadn't. It was true that he didn't know as much about Oz now as he would like, but he doubted she would have been able to stop him from meeting up with Edith. The only thing her change in stance would have caused was a rift in the family, and while Oz was strong and amazing and could handle many things, from what Gil had seen he wasn't sure Oz could have survived that.

"But, I…" she was silent for a while, before picking up and finding her voice again. "Edith's grandparents are…"

Okay, she was crying, and Gilbert was back to having no idea what was going on again. As if it would sting him, he awkwardly offered his hand to her shoulder, which she covered with her own.

"Edith's grandparents are just so angry. We met them at the courthouse earlier and they just can't understand why Edith and Elaine would want to get away from them." She was shaking. She'd stopped crying, but she was doing the same little tick he'd seen Oz do the past few days, shaking slightly and thumbing the loose threads of her apron's seams. "And I get it. They're scared. Their child has hit rock bottom before, and they're scared that if they let her go on her way again, she'll go back to that and she'll drag their grandchild down with her. I know that. I know that!"

Beatrix went to wipe her eyes on her sleeve, but he reached into his apron pocket and offered her his handkerchief.

Instead of taking it immediately, she stared at for a few moments before snorting.

"What?"

"Nothing." Beatrix took the bit of linen and wiped her eyes, careful not to get any topsoil on it.* Then she handed it back, picked up the spade again and tried to go back to planting her seeds. She faultered before the blade entered the soil.

"It's just," she mumbled again, and this time Gil couldn't see her eyes because her head was bowed. Beatrix was no longer stabbing the soil, but instead doodling impressions onto the surface absentmindedly with her finger. "I know what it's like, trying to impress what you think is best onto someone—" And she sounded so strangely miserable and self-loathing. Was she crying again? "—out of fear that they don't know what's best for themselves. I understand. I've felt that too. I've tried so, so hard to keep both of them safe. And here the stupid Lymans are, doing everything I've struggled to learn is so, so wrong."

Beatrix finally turned her back to the bench, and he could see that her rage and sorrow was seemingly spent, with only weariness remaining. She leaned back against the wooden surface, sighing into the relief of pressing her weight against the extra support.

"We haven't told you about why Edith and Elaine are in the situation they're in, have we?"

He shook his head, knowing that speaking may ruin whatever it was Beatrix needed to say.

"Elaine was this hardcore teenage rebel. She ran away as a kid, barely eighteen. Got a criminal record, got hooked on a lot of things she shouldn't have, and ended up back at her parents before her twentieth birthday, baby in toe. And they gave her a place to stay again. And that's nice, but—" Her voice hitched again, almost imperceptibly "—but whatever they did while doing it, and whatever it is they've been doing, they broke her." Beatrix looked down at the floor, rocking her heels slightly. "Or, maybe they just didn't let her fix herself. Too scared she'd break more, maybe. But she barely speaks now. She's always scared everyone will hate her, and always too timid to ask for help when she needs it, and always, always ashamed of herself."

Oz's mother's voice was strange, he thought. There was pity and heartbreak; there was terror, and there was regret. And he didn't know her well enough to place the cause of any of these, but his heart nearly broke itself with her next desperate half-whispered words.

"And God knows that if I'd slipped up, my baby could have broken just like that." Her knuckles grip white against the wood of the table. The ends of her sunny hair twitched slightly with the shuddering of her shoulders.

And then there was rage in her voice yet again. This time, subtle and silent as a glacier.

"And they don't even care."

His hand went to his handkerchief again, and then to her shoulder. After she calmed herself a second time, he finally asked her. Despite his wish that the people he cared for most had stayed the same, had remained happily stagnant without any more fear or pain or hurt, waiting just out of reach for most of his life until he could find them again, he knew better. There were things he needed to know. And there were probably things she needed to know, too.

The door to Edith's room was open when he went back to their hallway on the third floor, but he knocked anyways to let her know he was there. She jumped from her seat, nearly tipping over her borrowed laptop in her start.

"What's going on?" He asked her.

She bit her lip, pouting and glaring at the laptop as Gilbert approached the desk she was sitting at. "Stupid Pigeon won't tell me what's going on, now that he knows I'm out of town. Just that he's glad I'm here." She kicked the leg of her desk, but it lacked strength. "I tried going around him by asking Mr. Wilde but he just said he didn't have time to give me the full story, and that he was glad I'm here too."

Gilbert absentmindedly thumbed the collection of (mostly) historical fiction DVDs on her desk, scowling briefly as The Nightingale's Lover made its wretched appearance in his life again.*

"You think the riots have gotten to your neighborhood?" he asked, turning to face her so that he could hide his attempts at nudging the abomination into the waste bin behind his back.

She raised an eyebrow. "Don't touch that. It's on my marathon list for when Oz comes back." He grimaced but stepped away, aware that if anything happened to the atrocity now she would know he'd done it. "And yes," she finally said, "yes I am. All the more reason Mom should never have to go back to that place again."

What about you? he almost asked, but he knew with certainty that it was a stupid question.

There may have been one hundred years between Alice and Edith, but there was no doubt in his mind that whatever her name, she hadn't changed that much. When push came to shove, she would take care of everyone around her, and trust taking care of herself to him and Oz.

AN: Gilbert's way of comforting someone is pretty much 'I have no idea what I'm doing; someone help me.' And no one's helping him.

This whole scene is a callback to Advance III, in which Beatrix briefly slips out "I don't like letting you go, baby, and I'm still not sure of this. But if it'll finally give you whatever it is we haven't been able to, I'd be an awful mother to stop you." This is a core value of how she has raised her children, something she has suffered through and been forced to learn by watching her son mentally battle through the duality of being both Oz and Lewis and feeling unable to help.

Yeeeeaah, Oz was a problem child. He didn't try to be, but he was, and he caused many, many sleepless nights for both his parents. (Anderson was also a problem child, in the more stereotypical sense that he picked too many fights and had the eruption rate of a Hawaiian volcano). That's why she said she "tried so hard to keep both of them safe" - she's talking about Oz and Anderson.

On the other hand, guess who Anderson got his temper and over-protective tendencies from?

Details:

*Mr. West and Misses Hektor return! Poor Mr. West. Hilariously, the fact that he's constantly stuck in the past means he actually knows more of what's going on than a lot of other people, even if he himself doesn't even know he knows it. Weird.

*You may notice that I'm very specific with flowers, even in throw away details. This is because I, too, am a fan of flower symbolism. There is 'regular' flower symbolism in use—with flowers representing certain emotions or messages—but there is also personal symbolism, involving birth flowers. On the other hand, Edith and Oz now have two birthdays, don't they? I can just imagine Oz being a little cheat and asking Anderson for presents on both.

*Wouldn't it be weird if, the next time you needed a tissue, some guy shows up and pulls a handkerchief out of his pocket? Gosh Gilbert, get with the century here. If she wasn't emotionally compromised at the moment, Beatrix would have had exactly as much restraint as her youngest son when it comes to teasing you.

*I am never above inserting hilarious fandom jokes into my stories. Never. And the suspiciously titled Nightingale's Lover is the most tease-worthy thing in existence. For those of whom don't know this, someone made a joke on Ryoura's blog that fiction writers would definitely be all over the fact that some of the Dukedoms had family members that never seemed to age (Duke Barma, Sharon, Break, Oz popping out of nowhere ten years later looking identical to his 15-year-old self, and of course Gilbert, who stopped aging afterwards and for the first few decades wasn't as good at avoiding photographs and written descriptions). This created an entire subgenre of historical fiction with these characters and their variously explained apparent immortality—and you can guess what the young adult novels latched onto. To Gil, they and their authors are like cats: probably Satanic, and easily used to mess with him. Oz must never know (but he does, Gil. He does).