A/N: This was a random little kernel of an idea that ended up being way longer than it probably needed to be, but I don't care. Daddy Dracula and Baby Mavis were too adorable to resist. This is an un-beta-ed work and only proofread once so there are no doubt tons of errors. I apologize.

There will probably be one more chapter to finish this.

xoxoxo

Sweet Daydreams

Putting Mavis to bed was a long and often complicated process. It usually involved spontaneous chases, which lately included her transforming into a bat the second he caught up with her, baths that ended with half the water on the floor, and Mavis pulling out just about every storybook on her shelf as she tried to decide which one she wanted him to read. Lately she had adopted an "I can do it myself" attitude to just about everything, which made things like getting dressed and fang brushing much longer and messier than they would be otherwise. Also factor in that half their things were still mixed up in crates, waiting to be unpacked as he dealt with the chaos of moving, and their first day in the hotel was doomed to be a long one.

Dracula had to talk her into wearing her spider pajamas since he couldn't find her bat ones, and he dug through at least five crates looking for her Rapunzel book since he bribed her into going to bed on time in the first place by promising to read it, specifically. Finally, she was all tucked in, he'd finished the story, and she was starting to look drowsy. He blocked out all her windows, put out all the candles, and kissed the top of her head before leaving.

He bypassed most of his own bedtime routine and simply collapsed backwards into his coffin. The hotel wasn't even open yet and he was already exhausted. Granted, that was partly because he didn't have much of a staff yet. A few suits of armor and some of the construction crew were still around, not much else. He finally put aside the foreboding thoughts of all the hiring he'd have to do out of his mind long enough to catch some much-needed sleep.

It was then he heard the scream.

His head smacked against the coffin lid as he tried to bolt upright. Holding his forehead, he stumbled out into the hall, flicking a wrist to bring up the lights.

"Mavis!" he shouted. "Mavis, are you alright?!" He sped into her room, throwing back the pink covers to find her bed empty. "Mavis?" He checked under the bed, the corner behind her dresser, and tore open her closet. She wasn't there. Something in his chest started to twist.

"What's the disturbance, sir?" One of the suits of armor poked his helmet into the room.

"My daughter is missing. I want her found immediately."

"Yes sir!" The armor snapped to it's full height and saluted.

Dracula stood frozen, trying not to let his mind succumb to blind panic. He'd gotten there too quickly for her to have gone far, but if she wasn't in the room… His gaze drifted to the windows, the black curtains dimly haloed with sunlight. She knew better than to go near those. He'd told her so many times what would happen. She knew the light would hurt her. Didn't she?

He moved closer to the curtain, reaching for it, not quite knowing why. What if she'd somehow gotten out? What if she was trapped or lost or worse? What would he do then?

Suddenly, the armor reappeared. "Sir, the dumbwaiter was opened."

"What?"

"She must've crawled in and caused it to drop. Stevens says she's down in the kitchen."

"She's what?!" Dracula erupted. He flashed down flights of stairs as a trail of purple smoke and burst into the kitchen in mere moments. A second suit of armor was there, Stevens apparently, his metal hands gesturing at the opened dumbwaiter as he attempted to coax something out of it.

Dracula pushed passed him and, sure enough, there was Mavis, sitting in the lift like a little ball, her legs tucked into her chest and her face pressed against her knees. He released a quick breath as the panic began to recede.

"Mavy, honey, are you alright? Are you hurt?"

She lifted her head slightly at the sound of his voice, just enough so he could see her eyes. Then she wordlessly stretched out her arms the way she'd done as an infant when she wanted to be held. He reached in and pulled her out.

"It's alright, my little one. Daddy's got you." He hugged her as tightly as he could to his chest. She bunched his cape into her tiny fists and buried her face in his collar. "You're safe now, little mouse," he soothed.

Then he turned to the suit of armor. "I want every dumbwaiter in this place blocked off. Contact the foreman and tell him I want them filled in as soon as possible."

"Of course, sir," the armor replied.

Dracula nodded in thanks before heading out, murmuring comforting words to his daughter till they were back in her bedroom. "What were you doing in the dumbwaiter, Mavy? You were supposed to be in bed. You could've been hurt." He tried to maneuver the girl so he could look her in the eye but she fastened herself even tighter to his neck.

"You're alright now, Mavis." He sat at the edge of her bed, unlatching her fingers one by one until he was free of her grip. "We need to go back to sleep now." He set her down.

"NO!" Her reaction was so loud and so immediate it startled him almost as badly as learning she'd been dropped down the dumbwaiter shaft. She jumped off her bed and flung herself around his waist, squeezing like a vice.

"Mavis, what's wrong?" he asked, the horrible twisting feeling returning. "It's just your same old bed. Don't you like your old bed?"

"No!" Her cry was muffled into his shirt. A lump formed in Dracula's throat. He'd assumed she'd been frightened by her experience in the lift but he still didn't know what made her crawl inside in the first place. Mavis liked small, dark places, especially when she was scared. She was always burrowing into blankets or hiding behind furniture when he read her scary human stories. Though how she knew there was a tiny elevator just down the hall he couldn't know for sure. He obviously wasn't going to get anything out of her in this state either.

"Mavis," he said softly, "would it be better if you stayed with Daddy in his coffin just for today?" The child nodded. "Okay, Sweet-fangs, come here." He scooped her up once more, this time taking her into his room.

They redid a bit of the bedtime routine. She was fast asleep before he got halfway through Rapunzel, and he put out all the candles and kissed her forehead before drifting off to sleep himself.

The next night Mavis acted like nothing unusual had happened at all. She woke up before he did and sat flipping through the pages of her book, her feet kicking happily in the enclosed space. Even he couldn't see well enough to read it with the coffin closed, but she didn't seem to mind. She also didn't seem to mind that the coffin was really only made to fit one person so she ended up rolling and kicking him most of the day.

She never directly answered him when he asked about the dumbwaiter, preferring to prattle on and on about some adorable beetle family she'd made up with rainbow wings. He spent half the evening unpacking and the other half trying to keep Mavis from painting the ceilings with her watercolors. He won that battle by skillfully tickling her into submission, which truthfully only ended up spilling more paint, but it was the principle of the thing. At dinner she insisted on cutting up her food by herself. She stabbed uselessly at her mouse with a butter knife, giggling impishly whenever it sunk in. He cut one of his mice into bite-sized pieces and snuck them onto her plate when she wasn't looking.

He found her bat pajamas, which made that part of bedtime move smoothly for once. In fact, she was behaving just fine until he started to leave. He flicked a wrist to extinguish all the candles and turned to kiss her forehead, only to find she had crawled to the floor and attached herself to his pant leg.

"No, Daddy, I want to go with you," she said in a small whine.

"Babyclaws, that was just for one day, remember. You need to sleep in your own room, now."

"But I don't want to!"

"Is this because of what happened yesterday? Is that why you're scared of your bed?"

She nodded solemnly.

"Is it something in the room that scared you?"

She shook her head to say 'no'.

"Is it something in your coffin? Or under it?" He bent down to peek under her bed.

She shook her head again.

"If it isn't something in the room…" Dracula looked around, trying to put the pieces of what his daughter was telling him together like some bizarre puzzle. "Is it… is it something… that you dreamed? Did you have a bad daydream?"

Her uncharacteristic stillness gave him a more definitive answer than any words could. She drew her knees up to her chin and wrapped her arms around herself. His heart jolted into his throat.

"There, there, Sweetheart. Do not be frightened. It's all right." He gently lifted her into his arms. She settled against his shoulder. "Can you tell Daddy what it was? Telling Daddy will make you feel better," he suggested.

Mavis responded with an impromptu yawn, her budding fangs showing. "I… dunno," she mumbled.

"You don't know what it was, or you don't know if you can tell me?"

"I dunno."

Dracula sighed. Mavis sleeping in his bed wasn't a huge problem; perhaps she was already too old for it, he didn't know. But the fact that it was stemming from some fear, something hidden inside her mind where he was helpless to do anything, worried him. Already he could feel the knot beginning to form somewhere behind his heart.

"You can stay with Daddy, Mavis," he reassured her. "You can always stay with Daddy."

A/N: -I'm assuming vampires don't need to breathe, hence why they can sleep in closed coffins without, y'know, suffocating. *Don't try this at home, kids* I also realize the monsters in the movie used phrases like "good morning" to signify the evening when they actually wake up and other such shenanigans, but... I dunno, that made no sense to me. I tried to stick with describing what the time of day actually was, so since vampires sleep during the day they would refer to nightmares as daydreams since they happened during the day, etc. I'll try to keep it consistent.

-Is the jury still out on how to handle writing Drac's accent? I generally find phonetically typing out a character's every vocal inflection to be more distracting than helpful (in this case, using "Vhat?" instead of "What?", etc.) but that could just be laziness talking. I was wondering what the fandom at large thought of this since it is a part of his character. Does it help you guys, or does it just get distracting?