Their dance is like twilight touching the earth, the purple, the pink, of herself and her magic raiding his eyes and dappling the navy sky around them with a glow that twists. And it is because he is so close to her, the ribbon of her white hair wrapped round the space in which his body floats, that he can see the stars dance, the spiked gleam he sees them as down on Earth now extending into circles, globes, things that trot out into the constellations like the full-stop on a page. They move as she moves, they stop when he stares and he is dizzy, in love, with her and the space she creates.

'Can you see?' she asks, her voice blurred with the resonance her true form gives her, lacking the rigid definition of a human throat. 'Can you see them the way I do?'

He wants to cry.

'Ahhh...' she says, sounding a little sad. 'Perhaps not. Your flesh is such a cage for your soul. If only I could let it free.'

She brings them down with a soft swoop and Max stumbles, falls, some part of him angry at himself for feeing so relieved.

'It was...' he gasps, breathes. 'It was wonderful, doll. Beautiful, even. Seeing the universe the way you do...it's a wonder you can stand to pose as a corporal creature at all!'

She tilts her head to the side, the purple gleam of her neck shining in the same way light gathers on a slick, black surface, enfolding itself within the lines of its dimension.

'Well,' she says, and now, as Max watches, her voice dips down into the register she wears before they make love, the rest of her falling away into familiar dusty hues as she wraps herself up in her human skin. 'There are certainly things enjoyable about wearing a skin.'

She reaches out to touch his face and the light of her fades completely, locked under pores and follicles capable only of reflecting, rather than shining. Still beautiful, Max thinks, even if it feels sometimes like a little bit too much like a lie.

'Sensation takes on an interesting new range when you cover yourself with so many tiny imperfections,' she says. 'Warts, wrinkles, the spikes of an unshaved face.' She smiles mischievously as her thumb swipes against his jaw-line and he shudders, the nerves tugged by the soft set of her skin against the rough grain of his stubble.

'I didn't have much time this morning,' he said defensively.

'Ah, but I assume you will make time for me, this evening?'

He stares at her, at the coy look in her eye. He's ashamed to think it, but in some ways she is easier to read when she is like this, when she wears the frame of his species like a fancy new dress.

'Do you even have to ask?'

Verdona is a bitch when she's pregnant. It's not all her fault; it must be frustrating to be trapped in a body you were never born to walk in, to be ransacked by hormones you used to be able to float free from whenever the fancy took you. Now she has been kidnapped by alien biology, held hostage by a life-form that needs her to stay corporal for nine months in order to survive.

'That's almost a full rotation of your planet round your sun!' she howls, and Max wonders, not for the first time, how time is measured on Anodyne.

Gone is the excitable flutter of delight in her human smile, gone is the tentative shine in her eyes, present when she first came to him four months ago and said in a wondering tone, 'Max, I can feel a spark inside me.'

Anodites apparently have no need for a pregnancy test. Which is probably just as well. If she hadn't...if she couldn't have felt their son in her stomach, the beginning of him anyway, would he have been crushed out of existence, turned to photons of mana and light that circulated her system when she inevitably changed back?

No, he tells himself. Do not worry about what will never happen. One of them needs to keep a level head.

But that does not stop him from driving, at three in the morning, to a ramshackle burger bur to grab hold of those strawberry smoothies she likes so much. On the way back, he stares at the cup he keeps balanced on the dashboard, feeing his lip curl at the way fountains of frothed-up milk splash and tumble over the edges. A blob of half-melted ice-cream rises to the top like a lonely iceberg and he shudders.

He hopes this love of mashed-up liquids is not passed down to his children.

Verdona is not a bad mother. Not that he thought she would be, but Max is not blind, not stupid to her flaws. He remembers the blank look on her face when watching an old lady sob over her dead flowers. They had been old, the last reminder of a gift her dead husband had given her.

'Do not worry,' Verdona had told her. 'All life dies, when it is closed off inside a single organism. There is no way for the mana to re-new itself when it is closed off from the world at large. But now it is released, free from the stalks that held it in, and it can join the rest of the flow and become a part of something new, can help create something just as beautiful as before.'

The old woman stares at her. 'New-age hippie,' she finally hisses and then storms off, the angry heave of her movements doing nothing to disguise the tremble in her hands.

Verdona is perturbed; perturbed enough to sprinkle some mana into the withed roots of the dead plant, to try and urge it back to life; but Max lays his hand on her shoulder.

'No,' he says, 'Verdona, you can't.'

Now it is her turn to stare at him.

'I mean, you obviously can,' he hastens to explain. 'But just because you can do something, doesn't mean you should.'

Her lips quirk. 'A human rule?' she asks.

'No,' he informs her, 'one of life. Or at least for those of us stuck with one fleshy body.'

Still, he keeps an eye on her over the years, especially when pet hamsters die and their children are first exposed to death. Luckily though, she says nothing spooky about how the mana inside the hamster is free to rejoin its brethren in a circulating flow that only she can see.

He doesn't forget, one night, how he slips into the room of their children to see her staring at their duvet-swaddled forms, her eyes glowing with a deceptively pale pink light as she watches them breathe.

'I missed you,' he tells her. 'Why don't you come back to bed? It's cold without you there.'

She looks at him, the glow yet to die from her eyes, and for a moment he fears she will yell at him, accuse him of loving space and other aliens and their welfare too much to come home, to stop himself from being dragged off onto missions that spill out into months.

But she can't know, he reassures himself as she turns away, a look of dull boredom on her face, boredom that makes his pulse race with something akin to panic. She can't know that I'm a Plumber.

She sighs. And the words that spill out of her mouth cause a chill to bury down, to take root at the centre of his spine.

'I expected them to be more interesting than this.'

'They're so human,' she struggles to explain later, when they're wrapped up under the sheets. But even so, despite the waver in her voice, he can't bring himself to hold her close. 'But there's no spark inside them. Sometimes, when I'm listening, really closely, I think I'll hear a flicker from Frank. But the mana doesn't flow out of him, even when he's upset, so it's probably just wishful thinking.'

'They're our children, Verdona,' Max says, all of him steel. He holds himself like a soldier, rigid, even as her fingers creep out to settle on his cheek.

'Yes,' she says, 'and I love them, so much that I could burst. Sometimes, I think that if they needed me too, I could stay trapped in this human form forever. And for an Anodite, that is a scary thing. Sometimes I don't think you know how scary, Max.'

Well, she's probably right about that. He can guess but not know.

'It's just difficult,' she sighs, 'to look at them and know, that there's nothing really of your true self inside them.'

When the kids leave the house, she starts to drift. Some afternoons he'll come home and find her missing, dishes still in the sink, towels flopped over under the still-running taps.

'Verdona,' he asks her when she returns, leaves in her hair and the scent of clouds near her lips, 'where did you go?'

'Out,' she says wistfully. 'Out, somewhere, anywhere that's free.' She looks at him, shutters falling down over her eyes and he blinks, finds himself wishing for her to unveil her purple limbs, to look at him with eyes dappled with white, pupil-less sight, so that he can read her. 'I'm starting to feel too small in this place, Max.'

That's how he knows he's beginning to lose her.

Their boys understand. Of course they do, they're good kids.

Frank shakes his head, scratching the back of his head. 'If it makes you both happy,' he finally says.

But his younger son, Carl, always bristling, ever since he was ten and it first sunk in that no, dad couldn't be there for every football game or birthday or for anything remotely important, looks at him and hisses, 'what a surprise! Mom can't be bothered to stick around for someone who's never there! Well, good for her! Serves you right.'

Max could tell him that his mother is far from home, that she has sacrificed years of herself to make sure her sons don't grow up without her. And that in some ways, she hasn't been here, all of her at least, for a good long while. But he's seen Carl offer contemptuous looks towards the TV when protesters on screen rant about Roswell and he's seen his lip curl when movies decorate the screen with aliens. And he's always hated Star Trek, even if he does approve of the social messages inside each episode.

No. It may be cowardly, but he's not sure how to break the news that their mother's an alien and that she wants to go home.

Years later, after they believe him dead for months, after they find out both their children are a little too connected to the stars than they'd both like, he apologises.

'I'm sorry,' he says, 'I couldn't...I'm just sorry. I don't know who I was trying to protect. You, from the knowledge that your family wasn't normal, me, from seeing how everything was falling apart, or your mother, from trying to keep her from feeling guilty over something she had no real control over.'

Frank shakes his head and readjusts his glasses. 'I always knew,' he says softly. 'I came across mom in her Anodite form when I was six. I thought it was cool like she was an enchantress or something. It wasn't until later that I realised the implications it could have for my own children. But there was never really anything I could do about it so...' he shrugs helplessly.

Carl snorts. 'Well, it's nice that one of us was a little in the loop.' Then he softens. 'Well, I guess I'll have to get over it. Ben and Sandra would never be comfortable around me if I don't.'

Max feels pride brim up inside him. We did well Verdona, he thinks. We weren't perfect, but we did enough.

The lake is beautiful, glassy with the green it reflects at its edges, the rest of it spilling into blackness with the dark centre alit only with stars.

'Aw,' he teases her, 'you left a flower.'

She watches him, her white eyes spilling out from the gloom like lamps. But they do not narrow in anger. 'It appears our grandchildren have big mouths.'

'What? You're not going to give another one, now that you know I'm alive?'

She comes to perch beside him, legs folding up underneath her with a sleekness he admires. Like this, she could look like a woman half her age, slender and unruffled. If, that is, she didn't look so alien.

'I don't give flowers to liars.'

His smile falls. 'There were unavoidable circumstances. I didn't mean to make our family sad. But at the time...'

'There was no choice,' she finishes for him. 'Yes, Max. That's the way it is with your line of work. That's the way it will always be.'

He is quiet for a moment.

'Is that why you left?'

She gives him a level look and he marvels at how much better he has become at reading her expressions when she is an Anodite. Her human face is wrinkled, like a crumpled map he has forgotten how to read. But her Anodite one is just as smooth and easy to look into as it was when they first met. There is a strange comfort in that, even if it does not feel like a particularly human one.

'You know why I left. I left because I was me and, in the end, could be nothing else. And you left, were always leaving, in all the years we were together, because you couldn't be anything less than Max Tennyson, the man who wanted to walk through the stars by himself.' Her lips twitch. 'And one day, walk on the moon.'

He grins. 'Oh yeah, I never did tell you how I ended up on the moon, after all that hassle.'

'You could tell me now.'

And he does, feeling grateful that this time, she stays long enough to hear him through to the end.

Notes: Probably one of the few canon pairings I like on the show.

Just...sometimes I think how hard it must have been for Verdona to blend in with humanity and all those messy biological functions we have in order to watch her children grow up, and I get sad.