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the first thing that gemma saw in the mirror was not her beautiful hair, or soft face, instead, it was her stomach. her stomach, which had absolutely nothing wrong with it. but gemma had noticed the slight change, the fact that she gained weight.
“that’s fucking it! my body just doesn’t want me to be happy.” gemma yelled at the mirror, “it has no other reason to make me like this. it just wants me to be inferior and overweight.”
gemma sighed as she picked at her stomach, nitpicking at every little thing that she deemed as wrong. oh, poor gemma. she was actually a little bit underweight, and her body type was naturally a little bit more chubbier.
her insecurities didn’t come from nowhere, though. she was actually a jeeode native to water island before! and there was a sort of asshole-ish duo of a tweedle and jeeode named palila and vernee, respectively.
they belittled gemma a lot during her time on water island, and she was there for a while, before being teleported to ethereal island and meeting ayizius, a boodoo (or her ‘twin brother’), and the rest of the denizens of ethereal island (up to that point).
it took years for gemma to begin to recover from that, but even now, sometimes she has days where everything feels bad. recovery isn’t fast, or instantaneous, after all. it takes time, care, and effort.
however, gemma wasn’t really in the best of moods right now, and being somewhat easily triggered, she did, and then weighed herself on a scale.
that’s how we got to this point.
and as gemma looked at herself in the mirror, she heard a knock on her door, she knew it could only be one person. val. it made her realize that maybe it wasn’t torture after all, because val would always pop up when she most needed them.
gemma opened the door, and val’s nervous, smiling face greeted her. she smiled back.