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December 2000
The crowds in the Hoover building thin out as the holidays approach. Hanukkah starts tomorrow and Christmas is next week, but for Scully time stopped months ago when Mulder disappeared in the woods of Oregon.
The life growing within her is the only bittersweet reminder that the days march on. It doesn’t feel right for anything to flourish while she’s enveloped in darkness.
She wants it all to pause until Mulder returns. But life perseveres. Her hair grows faster and thicker, her heart beats harder as it works to pump more blood through her body, and her belly is starting to protrude. Her stubborn, miraculous baby keeps growing and making its presence known against all odds. Just like its father.
He’s missed so much already. She’s nearly halfway through her pregnancy and it doesn’t make sense that Mulder isn’t here to experience it alongside her. As an investigator, she knows the more time goes by, the less likely it is he’ll be found alive. But as his partner, his best friend, and his lover, she also knows the widely accepted figures and statistics do not apply to Fox Mulder.
She spends more and more time in the office. Only here does she feel like she’s upholding her unspoken promises—to never stop looking for him and to never give up on his work. The more time passes since his abduction, though, the more it feels like she’s spinning her wheels. She’s in constant contact with the Lone Gunmen but they’ve all but admitted the chatter on abductees in rural Oregon has dried up. There have been no reports of a man who fits his description wandering into a hospital or turning up at a morgue in months.
So she crisscrosses the country with her new partner hunting down humanoid bats and parasitic slugs, telling herself it’s what Mulder would have wanted. Ironically, if he were here, he’d tell her to go home, to rest, to take care of the baby and herself, but he isn’t here.
Now that it’s winter, she comes in before sunrise and stays long after sunset. Surrounded by his yellowing news clippings, file cabinets of notes written in his indecipherable (to all but her) scrawl, and array of trinkets and memorabilia, this is where she feels closest to him. Holed up in the basement, she lives in darkness.
Doggett is out for the week and she cherishes the time she can spend in the office on her own. He’s been a good partner, but sharing this space with anyone else but Mulder feels like a betrayal. Even Skinner left early for the day. He came down to the basement to tell her he’d be out until late next week and wished her a happy holiday. He does things like that now–checks in on her. She just nodded, gave him a tight-lipped smile, and wished him well.
She declined her mother’s invitation to join her at Bill’s in San Diego for Christmas this year, and when Maggie offered to stay back in DC with her, she begged her not to. If she can’t be with him, she only wants to be alone.
It’s getting late, even for her, but she isn’t ready to go home. Her apartment is too quiet and empty.
To bide the time before she can sleep, she walks around the downtown shopping district. She likes the anonymity it provides. Here, she can be just another woman doing last-minute Christmas shopping.
There’s an upscale baby and children’s clothes boutique that she often walks past but doesn’t dare go inside. It’s full of beautiful but expensive and impractical items like dry-clean only cashmere sweaters that will inevitably be covered in spit up, drool, and mashed up food. There’s nothing she would ever buy but she knows Mulder wouldn’t be able to resist the impossibly small pieces. She imagines rolling her eyes, but smiling, as he drapes tiny onesies over her belly and insists on spending hundreds of dollars on clothing their baby will outgrow in a matter of months.
She hasn’t bought anything useful or necessary for the baby, either. It wouldn’t be right to do it without him. Her mother keeps asking if she wants help cleaning out her second bedroom for the nursery, but she still imagines that there will be time to do it with Mulder once he’s back. “Once,” she repeats to herself. Never “if.”
Down the block from the children’s shop is a small Judaica store she hadn’t noticed before. A warm glow of light emanates from inside and she’s drawn to pull the door open.
She’s the only customer inside. The store is full of merchandise—intricately carved mezuzahs, Kiddush cups, servingware, and a wall of books in Hebrew and English—but it feels cozy, not crowded.
An older woman with wiry gray hair and black-frame glasses stands at the register near a glass case of jewelry. “Let me know if you need help with anything,” she says as Scully surveys the shelves.
She finds a small selection of menorahs and examines them one by one. There’s one made from shiny silver with inlaid blue stones, and another angular, more modern style. Then her eyes land on a small brass menorah. It’s tarnished in spots but still catches the light. Tiny olive leaves are sculpted along the branches.
“We’re a little picked over,” the woman calls over to her. “Last minute and all, you know?”
Scully smiles and nods at her. “This one is beautiful,” she says, picking up the brass menorah. It feels solid, heavier than she expected.
“It is, right? I found it at an estate sale. I wish I knew more about it but I can tell it’s old, possibly from the mid-1800s, and it’s similar to ones I’ve seen from the Netherlands.”
“I’ll take it,” Scully says. She’s never known Mulder to own a menorah, but it feels like something she needs to do to honor him.
At the register, the woman carefully wraps the menorah in tissue paper before placing it in a shopping bag.
“I’ll throw in some candles for you, too,” she says. “Happy Hanukkah.”
“Thank you.”
“And, I don’t mean to assume,” the woman says, her eyes dropping to toward Scully’s belly, “but b'sha'ah tovah.”
“Excuse me?”
“May your baby be born at a favorable time,” she says. “It’s a traditional Jewish blessing. We tend to be a little superstitious around pregnancy so we don’t say mazel tov until after the baby is born.”
“I appreciate that, thank you,” Scully says, bringing her hand to her stomach.
The shopkeeper’s words echo in her mind on the drive home. It feels like the only appropriate thing anyone has said to her about her pregnancy. She’s given hollow smiles and nods to ultrasound technicians who’ve congratulated her and asked how happy she was to be having a baby. Her mother has been a little more sensitive, but Maggie still insists on trying to cheer her up and look on the bright side even though her blessing is tinged with darkness. But: b’sha’ah tovah, at a favorable time. It gives her comfort—the hope that the right time will come, that Mulder will return to her and their child.
Back at her apartment, she gently unwraps the menorah and sets it in the center of her kitchen table. Looking closely at it, she sees there’s even more detail to each individual olive leaf, lines and shading etched into the brass, than she noticed in the store.
The next night, she comes straight home from work and digs a box of matches from her kitchen drawer to light the menorah. She and Mulder once celebrated an improvised Hanukkah with battery-powered candles in an airport bar, so she knows to light the center candle, the shamash, first. Then she places a candle in the far right branch and uses the shamash to light that one, too.
She grins at the improbability of it all: Dana Katherine Scully, star Sunday school pupil and lapsed Catholic, lighting a menorah. She doesn’t know the Hebrew prayer that Mulder recited to her once so she silently says her own. She prays for her baby and for Mulder, prays they’ll be together again soon.
More than two millennia ago, a group of Jews kept a menorah, just like this one, lit for eight nights through the power of their beliefs alone. Like the Maccabees, she’s exhausted nearly all of her resources. To the FBI, Mulder’s disappearance is essentially a cold case with no leads left to track. There’s no evidence for her to analyze or put under a microscope hoping it will guide her to him. All she has left to go on is faith.
The warm glow of the candles reflecting on the brass cuts through the darkness surrounding her. She feels the tiniest flutter within her and it nearly takes her breath away. She brings a palm to her belly and feels it again. Life perseveres.
“Happy Hanukkah, little one,” she whispers. “Next year we’ll light the candles with your dad. I promise.”