A/N: I just finished watching "Leonard Betts" and had to write this.
"You have something I need."
The words echo in her head like a terrible song she heard on the radio once and wouldn't stop humming for days until she drove Mulder insane with it. One of the few times she annoyed him as much as he annoys her.
She'd give anything for that annoyance, now.
But that phrase chilled her more than anything she's experienced so far-worse than Boggs calling her "Starbuck," worse than Duane Barry breaking into her room, mostly because it was unexpected. Though everything in this line of work is unexpected for Dana Scully. Unexpected, but unsurprising.
She doesn't know why she allows herself even the faintest idea that science, logic, reason has any place in her world anymore-and it shouldn't, after what she's seen with Mulder. But still she finds herself clinging to these ideals.
Her mother always called her stubborn.
But this-a man's body without a head; a man's ability to regrow limbs, a man who is made of cancer... this shouldn't shock her, but it does.
If she's being honest, what shocks her is the phrase.
You have something I need.
She doesn't want to think about the implications of the phrase, but it's 2:09 a.m. and she can't sleep because of a cough and when she looks down blood is staining the handkerchief like a poppy.
She wants him to be wrong. She doesn't want to have anything Leonard Betts could have ever needed. She doesn't want to entertain the possiblity that-no.
That a man could regrow his head. Could regenerate. That a man could be made of cancer.
That a man could detect it.
There is no logic to that, no science or reason, nothing. Just a crazy man, just one of Mulder's wild conspiracy theories, but why then is she awake now, why is she giving thought to marching down to the hospital right now and demanding to be screened?
Because, she tells herself. She will be screened and they will find nothing and she can put the whole notion of Leonard Betts and Mulder being right to bed. And she will continue to live in her world of science and logic and shove all the things she's seen with Mulder to the back of her mind where she keeps them.
But then her phone is in her hand and she's dialing the number she knows by heart but she stops before the last digit, she stops before she can call him.
She stops before she can say it.
I'm scared, I need you, I need.
And the clock changes.
And she puts the phone down.
And she sleeps.