🌸 Invader Zim 𝔁 Reader Oneshots 🌸

Behind The Mask

(This oneshot was requested by Yo_Mom1235)

Your eyes shot open in an instant when it felt like your life flashed before your eyes. You were quick to notice your heart beating at an exponential rate inside your chest as though it were trying desperately to regulate itself back to normal, your breath heavy and your entire body woke in a cold sweat from your head to your toes. Placing a shaky hand over your chest, you sat upright on the bed, staring into the darkness of the room around you as you processed your thoughts and tried to get your bearings together. The air around you felt thick, but the more you were able to get the breath back into your lungs, the more the atmosphere around you eased and felt less intimidating to you than when you'd first woken up. This wasn't too abnormal for you to experience; ever since you moved in with Zim you'd been having nightmares and involuntarily waking up in the early hours of the morning from your own imagination. From the time you started to age into adolescence, nightmares were a fairly obscure concept to you, occurring rarely in your life from what you could recall, and never quite to the extent you were experiencing now. Nowadays, they happen every so often to you to the point where you'd be almost too nervous to fall asleep for the fear that you may wake up scared and panicked from another one of your dreaded night terrors. Your eyes darted around the room as your vision slowly adjusted to the darkness, barely being able to make out the silhouette of familiar objects in the room. To call it your room was still very strange for you to come to terms with, something was off about it. For the past three weeks, you and Zim tried to atone the room to whatever your liking, and even though you were thankful for his generosity towards his living arrangements with you, you found yourself feeling like it wasn't a place you could call home just yet.

As the story goes, you met Zim when you were in high skool and a bond slowly formed between the both of you. Your ability to see past his disguise made you connect deeply with him as you both grew to accept and understand each other individually. Throughout your life, you always felt like you were hiding behind a mask, pretending to be something you're not and keeping a deep part of yourself a secret from everyone, and that's probably why both you and Zim hit it off so well. But there was still a part of you that Zim hadn't discovered yet, a side of you that you were ashamed of anyone seeing and felt afraid that you may be judged for this aspect of your personality, despite not really being able to control it. So naturally, being fresh out of high skool, when Zim asked you to move in with him you were a little hesitant on the offer, but in the end you obliged in hopes that maybe this is what you needed in order to 'cure' this condition of yours. However, that turned out to be much further from the truth than you wanted to believe.

Dealing with trauma or negative emotions can be difficult for anyone, but for you in particular you knew you dealt with these situations in what society would consider an abnormal way. When times become too difficult for you to handle and when everything feels out of your control, you often revert to what's known as age regressing as a way to cope with whatever is going on around you. You'd always done it, whether on purpose or involuntary, because it's always been a comfort for you, knowing that there's that availability for you to mentally and emotionally go back to a time when life seemed less stressful for you, more manageable and like the world was yours to conquer. As this secret side of you continued to follow you throughout your upbringing and now into early adulthood, you knew how to get better at hiding it from people as you often chose to partake in this behaviour alone without any judgement from anyone around you. But now that you were actively living with your partner, who you know damn well can be the most judgmental, arrogant and rude alien in existence, your anxiety has never been so bad in your entire life. While this could very well explain the main reason why you're having these awful nightmares almost every time you fall asleep, you know deep down there are other things that also contribute to these factors as well, things you were trying desperately to ignore in the hopes that you'll eventually 'outgrow' those desires and begin to feel like a normal adult as you think you should.