Monster High: Fright On! | Monster High Fanfiction

The Worst Kind of Surprise

"Your father's home." His voice was quiet and calm, a soft baritone that had always reassured her ever since he became her personal driver so many years ago, but it didn't do well in soothing her then. Draculaura stilled, her body pausing mid-motion while shrugging off her tote bag. Her hands started to shake ever so slightly as she gripped the handle of the totetightly, the air in the backseat thickening with tension as a wave of anxiety washed over her. She felt his gaze on her, eyes boring into the side of her face from the front mirror while his hands tightened around the steering wheel.

"Thank you for passing that on." She whispered, forcing a small smile and trying her best to seem grateful. He just nodded curtly, his eyes worried, before he looked away from the mirror to pull out of the Monster High's pickup lane and onto the main street. Her hands fisted in her lap, fingers digging into her palms as she tried desperately not to break down right there in the backseat.

She didn't used to feel this way when concerning her father, but that was a long time ago; back when he could stand to look at her and didn't simply foist her onto the newest nanny or au pair. Nowadays he only tolerated her presence (if that), his eyes never passing over her face to instead look anywhere but directly at her. He was different now; distant, cold, and that only made things worse for her. If there was one thing she knew about her father, it was that he would never forgive her, never let her forget that she had been a disappointment to him for the mortal sin of looking like her dead mother.

When their resemblance first became apparent he'd been devastated, so weighed down by sadness in a way that wasn't dissimilar to how he'd been just after her death. She'd seen how hard he tried to hide the tears that would prick the corners of his eyes whenever he saw her; the way he looked at her, almost as if he was afraid that any day now she'd disappear before him like her mother had. It had taken him years —maybe even decades, if Draculaura's memory served her correctly— to fully come out of whatever dark corner of his mind he'd hidden himself away in after their mother's death, so she had waited patiently for him to crawl himself out of that hole again as he did before . . . but he never did. The pain lingered for a lot longer than she thought it would, and then as she grew older, and the resemblance got stronger, it switched from sadness to anger until he couldn't even stand to look in her direction. Back then that hadn't stopped her; she refused to give up hope, and even though he continued to deny her existence, that hadn't stopped her from loving him . . . and then came the night where she finally confronted him and any hope was dashed.

It hadn't gone well. She'd expected an explosion like the ones she always saw whenever someone challenged him at the Court, something so violent that it broke every single one of their bones and left them scarred—that's how much she believed her father hated her. Somehow, what he did was worse, for in the end, he had only stared at her, face devoid of emotion and said nothing, making no move towards her, making no attempt to comfort her—or at least make her believe that he regretted the way he'd treated her for a century. Nothing.

No forgiveness, no acknowledgement of how she was simply begging for her loving father to return from wherever he'd left. There were no lies, no half truths that would tell her otherwise. Instead, her father told her exactly how she needed to be. She needed to grow up and stop being such a baby, stop thinking that everything was going to be alright because it wasn't, and stop acting as if everything was fine when everything wasn't. Her father reminded her that her mother died for her sake, and now he was having to see her all over again, like a mirage in the distance. She felt the hurt deep within herself, and she was certain that it would continue to eat away at her heart until it reached its breaking point. Then he'd left. Just like that. Started doing business trips so frequently that she'd only see him for a night every few weeks till it was once every few months, till it was once a year.