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When Emma's thirty days old, she's already watchful, alert. Her eyes flick to the side when she hears Dean stomping into the house singing Kansas, when the microwave goes off in the kitchen to signal her bottle is finished warming, when Cas pads silently to her bassinet in the middle of the night to see if she's really there.
If she's really real.
She's like a hunter, that way, alert at the slightest sound; like an angel, quiet and waiting and watching. A little of Dean and a little of him, or what he was. Cas knows Emma isn't really any of him at all, not even any of James Novak. But when those small fingers curl around his thumb as he gazes at her in the moonlight creeping through the window, it feels like she is everything that he is.
(Most afternoons, after Dean's washed up from work, he and Emma settle down on the living room floor, Emma on her stomach on the fuzzy yellow blanket Amelia brought to the hospital for Dean to wrap her in. Cas worries it isn't safe; Dean says softly, "Watch her, Cas," and together they watch as she slowly, effortfully, raises her disproportionately large head. The blue bow Cas placed in her wisps of hair that morning slides off, onto the blanket, but it goes unnoticed in the face of the baleful stare Emma is directing in Dean's vague direction before she gives up and drops her head back down again. Just as quickly, she's straining to lift it again, and Cas clucks, not sure whether to be impressed or amused or annoyed by the stubbornness that seems to be a Winchester trait, and picks her up, cradling her head.
Dean laughs. "Is she your kid or what?"
Cas gives him an as usual, I do not understand you eyebrow.
"That stare," Dean says. "That was a straight-up Cas Glare."
Cas pretends not to be pleased.)
When Emma's two months old (because Cas counts, he counts so carefully, the same way he counts Dean's freckles when he's sleeping and the flecks of brown in Dean's green irises when they're making love), she doesn't grip Cas's thumb as tightly in her hand anymore.
But Dean still lies on his side next to Emma in the living room most days, watching her lift her chest up off her yellow blanket and grin at the vroom vroom sounds Dean makes to egg her on. She's all pink gums and dimples and the ruffled headband that invariably ends up lopsided over one ear. When Dean looks up and holds his hand out to Cas, beckoning him down, Emma's eyes follow it, moving past the midline when before she could only follow objects a short distance before her eyes gave up.
"You gotta get in her personal space, Cas," Dean had said, and put his nose to Emma's, blowing a raspberry against her round cheek. Now she's old enough to flail when he does it, to make excited sounds deep in her throat. "C'mon, you're an expert, aren't you?"
Emma's personal space is bigger, now, and when she sees Cas kneeling gracefully beside them, his hand in Dean's, she smiles and shrieks.
She makes a sound almost like a laugh when Cas's prickly cheek touches hers.
By three months, she can hold her head up without wobbling. She coos ceaselessly, stopping only when she sleeps, and now when she lies under her Jedi-themed mobile (a gift from Charlie), her soft hands lie open instead of curled shut. Her fingers don't close around Cas's finger even when he strokes his fingertip gently down her palm, that reflex dissipated like smoke, and he feels a strange sense of loss.
But when he hears the sound of tiny feet kicking the bottom of the crib, and goes in to find her awake, her blinks at the ceiling turning into an intent stare when she sees him, she sticks her pudgy arms and her pudgy legs asymmetrically into the air.
If she could speak, he thinks. If she could speak, what would she say?
By four months, she provides a better show for Dean than ever: When put on the blanket in the living room, she can roll over.
At first it's only with help: Dean putting one of his big hands on her small body and easing her over with a gentle "There we go" as Emma blinked rapidly, looking startled by the sudden change in position. Those first few times, she cried, and would only be consoled by Castiel coming over to pick her up, and hold her close and safe to his chest as he murmured to her about that scary father of hers, should they send him to go make dinner so Cas and Emma can read a story, hmmm?
But soon enough Dean's coaxed her into it, Emma no less vulnerable to the sheer Dean-ness of Dean than anyone else; soon she's rolling over every time they put her into her crib, on the changing table, even, on one memorable occasion, in her bathtub. She rolls and then cranes her head to look up at them with a grin that turns baleful when they take too long to roll her back over so she can roll again.
Now, as Cas makes dinner in the kitchen he hears the half-grunt, half-squeal sound Emma makes when she's pleased with herself, and Dean's laughter, just as pleased, the low rich sound that even Cas doesn't hear as often as Emma does, and he wonders if Dean's daughter will ever realize how different she is from everyone else, how different Dean is for her.
Because of her.
Six months is when Emma can tell stranger from Dad and other Dad. Six months is when Garth comes to drop off some African Dream Root for pickling and Cas has the poor judgment to let the hunter hold her while he takes the dream root to the cellar. Emma starts to cry so angrily that Sam and Amelia can probably hear her in Kermit.
She does it while reaching for Cas with what the development books call a raking grasp, and he thinks inevitably of Dean in that backyard, the leaves forming piles and baring the dry brown lawn beneath, how it might have been less painful to leave the dead things covering the dying thing underneath, but here they are, here they are, and he reaches for Emma as she reaches for him.
Garth takes the dream root to the cellar himself.
(But Dean's favorite thing about Emma at six months? "Look at her. Look! She's got her foot in her fucking mouth, Cas, who's even that flexible?"
Cas eyes Emma, who is sucking on her toes as she watches them back, then folds himself to the floor against the wall and draws his heel down to the corner of his mouth.
Dean's eyes go wide.)
At nine months, Emma scowls when Cas tells her "no." No, you can't put that pen in your mouth, Emma; no, you can't get out of having a bath tonight, Emma; no, you can't sleep with Dean and I tonight, Emma.
The first time Emma says, "Da da," Cas's strict no becomes an awed okay.
Her first birthday arrives, and with it Sam and Amelia to celebrate. She can walk on her own now, in the tiny pink Converse her uncle and aunt bring her to match the Garanimals overalls she suffers Dean to dress her in, and she's made enough crayon marks on the wall with her pincer grasp that even Dean's started to get tired of it instead of proud of what an artist his kid is ("what do you think this one's supposed to be, Cas, a frowny face?"), and she demands, "Eat!" when the two-layer cake is brought out and set on the long table full of Winchesters and Trans and a Mills and a LaFitte and a Bradbury and some junior ex-hunters and a Portia and a James and a Fitzgerald the Fourth. (Oh, and a Mr. and Mrs. Fizzles, who get Emma's suspicious glare through the entire meal, and a perplexed expression when Mrs. Fizzles disappears for Garth can eat.)
At twelve months, Emma can walk alone, but she doesn't have to.
By the time she is fifteen months old ("a year and three months, Cas," Dean says, "seriously, nobody counts in months after the kid turns one"), the new spectator sport in the house is Emma's matches with the stairs. Even Cas finds it amusing to watch her toddle her way up them, glaring at them from the bottom step like a challenge and then kicking the top step when she gets to it like a ha! I beat you. She uses spoons and cups now; as often as not, she uses them to knock over the tower of two blocks she can now construct, on the occasions Dean builds one in front of her and bets her that she can't build one as good as his.
"Better," she tells him with her Cas-stare, and laughter spills out of Dean as she takes one block in each chubby hand and makes a face at them like she's defecating.
Dean laughs harder.
By 18 months ("a year and a half, Cas, Jesus"), the tower of two turns to a tower of three, and Emma can knock the tower over and throw the blocks toward her toy box without toppling over, which was what always used to happen when she tried to stand up on her chubby legs and throw something at the same time. She can run, too, when Cas tells her to please pick her up block and place it in the toy box neatly, Emma; can run and laugh mischievously, clearly aware of her own cleverness in avoiding this chore. She usually ends up outside with Dean, pretending to fix Castiel's Honda with sticks she picks up from the yard to use as pretend wrenches.
It's Cas's turn to laugh when he comes out to his car one morning and finds dandelions decorating the hubcaps.
Time begins truly to fly, after that. Before Cas knows it, Emma's two years old ("finally," Dean says) and she doesn't need help to go up the stairs or down them, and they might as well not count how many blocks are in her towers anymore, they reach so high. (Cas counts anyway: seven.) She'll play next to Benny's young descendant ("grandkid, Cas. Let's just call him Benny's grandkid, okay?") even if she's not quite willing to play with him, yet, and she turns the pages on her own when Dean reads her bedtime stories and talks in declarative sentences ("I read!"), and takes off her shoes just to watch Cas tie her shoelaces again ("Teach me!").
Time flies faster, and Emma's three, pedaling down the driveway in the pink tricycle Sam and Amelia brought for her birthday, undressing herself at bedtime ("I did it!"), and when Benny's grandson comes over, she calls him "Benjafrass!" and shares her tricycle with him and her toy keyboard and her Fischer Price grill set, and the blocks that once made towers stay in the toy box, uncounted.
At four, Dean paints Emma a set of cement blocks to play hopscotch in the backyard. She hops and skips and dresses herself, and sometimes when Cas watches her playing with her friends through the kitchen window it feels like he's sliding back into the angel he was, a watcher, a sentry, meant to see and not be seen, or heard or felt or loved.
Then Dean comes up behind him, arms sliding around his waist, and he's human again.
When Emma's five, she asks what adopted means.
Cas tells her it means someone loved her so much they wanted her to be their family.
Emma wriggles her hand into his.
Cas grips it tight.