Heartbeats
Pete's away on work for Torchwood, Mickey's gone with him and Jackie's supposed to be asleep. The sleeping pills have all run out. The bed is cold and lonely, far too big and yet somehow even too warm without his freezing feet (why had she always complained about that so much? Right now, she'd do anything to feel his sub-zero toes pressing against her calves once more), and Rose cannot settle.
Jackie isn't asleep, either, but for entirely different reasons.
She's in the living room – they have enough space to have half a dozen living rooms, but neither Rose nor her mother see the sense in this – balancing a bowl off her now-enormous bump and munching gherkins with ketchup even as she bemoans how disgusting that is.
"I can't sleep without him," Rose says from the doorway, more of a plea than a confession. "I need him," she whispers, numb as to what her sentences may convey to her mother. For once, she doesn't care what Jackie Tyler thinks of their relationship – she loved him, she loves him, and she hasn't the energy to hide it anymore.
Jackie looks ever-so-slightly resigned, though certainly not surprised, at the revelation her daughter had spent the last few years sharing a bed with a nine-hundred year old alien, but says nothing, shifting up along the sofa and throwing the blanket up in silence.
Rose's head takes the place of the bowl, eventually, and if she closes her eyes and holds her breath and forgets to feel, she can almost pretend that the double heartbeat of mother-and-baby is his.