Sweets tightened the bow of his apron behind him - or, to be more accurate, Brennan's apron, which was printed with some kind of primal African pattern - and turned back to the mixing bowl, unaware of the smudge of flour on his cheek.
"So, Christine! My partner in crime..." he crooned, scattering in some fresh blueberries "Are we ready to do some baking?"
Christine gurgled happily in reply, swinging her legs enthusiastically in the high chair. Her eyes appeared to focus on his face and she broke into a grin. He knew all the books said that visual recognition wasn't possible from this distance at this age, but he was privately inclined to agree with her mother that Christine was highly advanced.
He spoke aloud to Christine to help develop her linguistics, giving her a running commentary as he mixed the batter, then poured the mixture into paper muffin cups.
"And now we let them bake for twenty minutes, and then, hey presto! Muffin magic." he scooped Christine out of the chair and blew a raspberry on her belly, while she giggled in delight.
He put her on his hip and rocked thoughtfully "Mummy wouldn't want us to call it magic, huh? She'd probably want me to explain that cooking is a chemical process. Good thing Mummy's not here!"
As though Christine had only understood the later part of that sentence, she started to whimper.
"Aw, hey! Forget I said that. How bout we sing a song? You love that, don't you, my little groupie?" Sweets tucked Christine up beside his head and sacheted around the living room, singing a Placebo song, the first tune that had popped into his head.
When he'd gotten to the lines "another love I would abuse, no circumstances could excuse" he stopped and thought about the appropriateness of singing this particular song to an infant. But hey, at least it wasn't death metal and Christine seemed to like it so he shrugged. Kids could definitely get over more traumatic things than song lyrics.
Long term studies had shown that if you managed to get a kid away from an abusive situation before the age of three, virtually no emotional harm came to them.
And he was proof that even if you got the kid after the age of six, they could recover from a lot.
He pulled Christine back from him and looked her in the eyes. She had Booth's strong chin, and his gameness for whatever was going on. Those bright blue inquisitive eyes, though, they were Brennan's.
"Bet you're gonna be pretty tough, aren't you?" his smile faltered. "But you don't always have to be. There's Daddy, you can go to him with anything and he'll take care of you. And Mummy, she'll help you solve any problem. And me. You can always come to me for all the little things Mummy and Daddy are uncomfortable talking about. Between you and me, Mummy and Daddy are pretty uncomfortable talking about a whole range of topics because they use denial as a coping strategy, but you don't have to worry about that." Sweets put a cheerful inflection on the word "denial" and gave Christine an Eskimo kiss before putting her back in her high chair and checking the muffins.
He knew as soon as he opened the oven door that they were done. The secret of his mother's recipe was the brown sugar, which caramelized when it mixed with the berry juice. It smelled old fashioned. Well it would, Sweets mused, flinging a tea-towel over his shoulder as he turned the muffins out to cool. His mother had no doubt gotten the recipe from her mother, so the recipe was over several generations old.
He shook himself out of the nostalgia. Being raised by older parents, he'd always felt a little out of synch, a little old-fashioned himself. He'd never realised that all those olde-worlde, middle-America skills, like baking, or learning how to balance a cheque-book, would set him apart one day. Hell, his muffin baking had even impressed Dr. Brennan. And she was just barely a credit-where-credit-is-due kind of woman.
He grabbed a muffin and bit into it while it was still hot, holding back a little wave of homesickness at the taste.
"It's about time we made you some lunch too, huh Christine? You hungry?" He scooped her up in one arm and a banana, a bowl and a teething spoon in the other and headed to the lounge for feeding time. Sweets' least favourite part of babysitting Christine was feeding time, because she had her mother's sense of comic timing and her father's throwing arm, but this time he'd come prepared. He'd left the apron on.
The third time Christine grabbed the waggling spoon with one fat baby fist, she forced it back into Sweets' mouth. "Ungh" he grunted, licking at the lip that was now coated in mushy banana and a familiar coppery taste.
His lip had split so often as a kid, it was amazing it hadn't scarred.
"No Christine, this mouthful is for you. Come on you cheeky monkey!"
No dice. Sweets grinned. Time for a little shrinky misdirection. He circled his index finger slowly, round and round in her field of vision until she was following it with her eyes. The tip of his finger came to rest on her nose and he made an "O!" sound which she instinctively mimicked.
He popped the spoon in her mouth before she knew what hit her. "Sweets feints with the left, and scores with the right." he chuckled.
After Christine had eaten half a bowl of mushy banana, and fingerpainted with the other half on Sweets' face and chest, he wiped her down with a damp flannel and put her to bed.
She lay in her cradle, her baby-brain far too curious about the outside world to admit she was tired.
"I guess you want a story, huh?" he put his hand on the cradle and rocked at it gently. "Well. I guess I can tell you one. And it's not one I tell many people, so you'd better take notes." he smiled, and looked down at the toddler.
"Once upon a time, there was a little boy who was very scared of other people. It wasn't so much his fault, all the people he had met so far in life were not very nice. And he didn't have a big tough Daddy or a scary clever Mummy to take care of him. So he got used to watching non-verbal cues, the little signs other people make with faces and bodies. He learned to predict when they were about to be not very nice, from a small twitch in their shoulder, or the way they used to curl their lip before they spoke." Sweets sighed. "he could even tell when they were lying." He looked back at Christine, whose head was cocked to one side like an inquisitive sparrow. He laughed despite himself. "The problem was, all he could think to do with this information that he saw in people was to turn himself invisible when trouble was coming, or, later, to trick the people who were trying to help him. But one day, using these non-verbal cues, he noticed a pretty girl in class who seemed sad. And he used his little tricks to make her laugh, and talk about her problem, and he began to realise that maybe he could find a way to trick people into being happier, and healthier. So he began to study psychology." Sweets beamed down into the crib. "Of course, he didn't get the girl...or the other girl...but he did get to meet Mummy and Daddy and you!"
Christine's eyes were starting to blink.
"And that's why, when you grow up, you don't wanna be a smelly FBI agent or even a cold, hard scientist. You wanna be a psychologist, like me, yeah? Yeah." Sweets leaned back in a chair and crossed his legs, and began to read aloud from one of his text books until he was sure Christine was really down for the count.
"She behaves very well when you take her." Brennan observed that evening, as her daughter wriggled in her arms to get more comfortable.
"She's a good girl." Sweets agreed.
"Did you have a good day with Sweets?" Brennan leaned forward and put her forehead to Christine's as she gurgled something.
Brennan leaned back, face stern.
"Sweets, have you been reading the soft sciences to my daughter?"
Sweets looked up from his half-eaten meal, fork half-way to his face. "I have no idea what you're talking about."
"Really? Then where did Christine learn a word like 'Jungian'?"
Sweets shrugged, and said "Beats me." shoving the fork into his mouth to hide his grin.