The session traces cannot be erased.

The trip home was a grey, wet blur. Magi had managed to get dressed, a mechanical, painful process over the sensitive, painted skin, but the thin layer of her street clothes was not enough of a shield. On the bus, even though no one could see the poisonous garden beneath the fabric, she felt it screaming through the cloth. Every casual glance from another passenger felt like a recognition, an evaluation. The painted tendril around her neck seemed to tighten with every stop, an illusion so powerful that it was hard for her to breathe.

Finally, the door of her apartment closed behind her with the definitive click of the lock. The silence, so longed for outside, fell upon her like a slab inside. There was no refuge here. This was where the echoes resonated the loudest.

She went directly to the bathroom, avoiding looking towards the bed, the armchair, any place that spoke of comfort or normality. Under the raw fluorescent light, she faced the mirror.

The person looking back at her was a painted phantom. Remnants of the garden persisted at the edges of her hair, along her jawline, on the curve of her ears. Smudges of metallic green and velvety crimson mixed with the corpse-like pallor of her skin. The blue eye on her chest, though blurred by clothes and sweat, still seemed to stare at her from the neckline of her T-shirt, a cold, inhuman spot.

But the worst part wasn't the paint. It was her own gaze. The eyes she saw reflected were no longer filled with tears of shame or panic. They were empty. Flat. Like the fish eyes of the dead in the fish market. The poisonous garden hadn't just bloomed on her skin; it had withered something inside her.

With automaton-like movements, she turned on the shower. The hot water, hitting her skin, brought no comfort. She dragged the sponge over her arm, scrubbing with a **** that bordered on violent. Ordinary soap made no dent in Lysander's professional paint. It only spread the green and red, creating murky, ghostly stains on her skin, as if the poison were seeping inward instead of washing away.

She scrubbed and scrubbed until her skin was raw and burning. But the garden persisted. The thorns, the petaled flowers, the tendrils... they were a temporary tattoo impossible to erase. Every rub was a reminder that the stain was not just superficial.

Finally, she surrendered. She turned off the water and wrapped herself in a rough towel that failed to warm the cold inside her. She left the bathroom and collapsed against the hallway wall, sliding down to the floor. Water droplets stained with color dripped from her hair, marking the light wood floor with small, dirty pink circles.

From her position on the floor, she could see the distorted reflection of the ceiling lamp in the wide-open bathroom mirror. She didn't see herself, just the light, a blind, brilliant eye watching her from the other room.

The apartment, once her sanctuary, was now profaned. Not by the paint dripping on the floor, but by the silence. A silence that was no longer peace, but the absence of everything she had been. There was no rage. No sobs. Only an exhaustion so profound that it was a form of living ****.

She knew, with a bone-chilling certainty, that even if she managed to get all the paint off, the garden would remain. It had taken root in the collectors' gaze, in the clicks of the cameras, in Elara's satisfied voice, in Lysander's impersonal touch. It had blossomed in the fertile soil of her shame and was now part of her ecosystem.

She closed her eyes, resting her forehead on her knees. Outside, the city lived, breathed, laughed. Inside, there was only the hum of a perfect void and the faint smell of turpentine and rotten jasmine that still clung to her skin. The poisonous garden did not need sun or water. It fed on silence. And tonight, it had made a bountiful harvest.