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Cythera

You can read this fic here. This fic was written for wawamouse's prompt in Oz Magi 2025. Updated: 17/01/2026.

Wish 9, Request 1

Pairing/Character(s): Miguel Alvarez/Chico Guerra

Keyword/Prompt Phrase: https://fanlore.org/wiki/Hanahaki_Disease

Canon/AU/Either: Either

Special Requests: Oz/prison setting preferred

Story/Art/Either: Story

This is just my subjective opinion about some of my decisions (plus a little bit of background on how I made them). I will be criticizing some of my decisions, but I hope that won't ruin the fic for anyone. Just to be safe:

[DEATH OF THE AUTHOR KLAXON]

Now, why did I pick this wish?

Hanahaki Disease isn't a trope I would say I know very well, but I can admire it from the outside. In fact, check this out. This is a real discord message I really sent. Note the date!

Well, you can see how that worked out...

PS: The article I was quoting there was this very interesting exploration of aromantic perspectives on Hanahaki tropes. Worth a read if you like the trope!

When I saw that there was a Hanahaki wish in this year's Oz Magi, I did a searching and fearless inventory of myself. Could I do this prompt justice? I decided that I could, because a) I have actually read some Hanahaki fics (though not many), and b) I was pretty sure I could guess who had made the wish, and Wawa probably wouldn't mind an unconventional take on the trope.

So I requested it, and I got it.

I did do some research....kind of. I didn't read any Hanahaki fics, in case I ended up subconsciously plagiarizing them, but I read the fanlore page about Hanahaki, and the wikipedia page for Hanahaki Disease. Yes, there is one.

Okay, enough stalling, let's talk about the fic. Let's start with the title...

Cythera is the island in Greece that Venus was allegedly born on. It's also part of the title of a poem about the island by Charles Baudelaire. It's part of his collection Les Fleurs du Mal ("flowers of evil"), which is about the only collection of poetry I can name, and also has the word "flowers" in the title.I used the Spanish translation of the name as the title of a movie in this fic....but we're getting ahead of ourselves. I went and read through the poems until I found one that seemed fitting, and "A Voyage to Cythera" was the closest I got. You can read it here.

Now, on to the fic....

Chico was at work when the hack came to get him. Lopresti said Dr Nathan wanted Chico to ditch work and come to the infirmary.

That was the first sign that something was wrong.

When he got there, the doctor was sitting beside a patient's bed. She stood up and came over.

Dr Nathan shook his hand and said "Carmén, right? But people call you Chico?"

That was the second sign that something was wrong.

Till then, he would have guessed that she didn't know his name. She'd probably had to look it up in the patient records, which meant she was making an effort to be considerate, which meant Chico must have a flesh-eating disease or typhoid or incurable gonorrhea or something.

A little reference to the Typhoid Mary AU there....

Where does Chico actually work? I kept it vague, because I didn't know. I could have asked someone, but the #1 Knower Of Things About Chico is Wawa, and I didn't want him to work out that I was writing his Magi fic!

I knew that I didn't want to write a traditional Hanahaki fic, with the Hanahaki sufferer coughing up flowers and trying to hide it. I don't know, I get second-hand embarrassment watching TV sometimes, I didn't want to put someone through the whole mortifying ordeal of being known in a fic. So I guess that's how I ended up writing about a doctor's appointment.

Dr Nathan's office was only for the real big ticket diagnoses - cancer, HIV, hepatitis. Shit you didn't want to find out in front of the whole ward.

Sure. Whatever.

He played it cool, but as he followed Dr Nathan to her office the feeling of dread started to hit him.

She fended off Lopresti, who wanted to sit in - probably wanted the gossip, Chico thought bitterly.

I was writing this fic and watching series 4 at the same time. I think I noticed that Sister Pete and Gloria kept having to tell the COs to wait outside while they talked to prisoners about personal or medical matters. From the CO point of view, it makes sense that they'd want to sit in on appointments in case a prisoner got violent. However, it's still a huge invasion of privacy (to go with all the other invasions of privacy prisoners experience). And you can easily imagine the COs abusing any sensitive information they learned.

Dr Nathan shut the door behind them. He almost expected her to lock it as well.

"Chico..." she said, like they were close, like they were on first name terms.

She wasn't smiling anymore. There was an uncertain look on her face, like she didn't know how to say what she needed to say.

Chico didn't want to break the silence: he didn't want to know what could be this bad.

In Oz, it seems like Gloria has to try hard to stop herself from getting personally invested in the cases of certain prisoners she can identify with, or that she feels sorry for. It also seems like this frustrates her. Gloria is good at her job, but I liked the idea that she's not good at this part of her job - delivering bad news.

Chico's mind raced. He went back to his list of big-ticket diagnoses, ticket-home diagnoses, running through them in his head as fast as he could. Cancer, hepatitis, HIV.

He didn't feel tired the way cancer was meant to make you feel: he wasn't coughing and spluttering like O'Reily had. He hadn't been fucking around or doing anything with a needle, and anyway, he'd been tested a couple years ago and come up negative.

I was trying to subtly imply here that Chico was voluntarily tested for HIV before he came to Oz. "A few years ago" = before he got sentenced.

I did approximately zero medical research for this fic. Chico's knowledge of HIV risk is based on what I've read and half-remembered in old Aids activist literature from the 80s and 90s. Anal sex was considered high-risk, especially without a condom; IV drug use was also considered high risk, especially if needles were shared and weren't cleaned.

Aids activists tried to make sure that their information was accessible and available to drug users and men who have sex with men. I am possibly being very optimistic about the reach and uptake of that information.

"Chico," she said, looking grave, "You know you went for those x-rays?"

"Sure," he said.

Some of the cons who'd been in the Em City riot back in '97 were suing the state for brutality and neglect and general shittiness, and one of the points on their list was inadequate medical care. That meant the higher-ups were hastily trying to cover their asses and do everything by the book, so the hacks could pretend that they always did everything by the book, even though anyone could tell you that usually the book had pages torn out so they could wipe their ass on it.

The upshot was that Chico had got to take a day trip to Benchley Memorial to get his health checked out.

I had to come up with a reason for Chico to get an X-ray done, and this was it.

Now, here's my big admission....I originally started writing this fic, with the same plot setup, but about Miguel, after he was captured and returned to Oz. I got pretty far with it. Miguel would obviously need some kind of medical checkup after living on the street, smoking fags he found on the ground, etc. But eventually the idea seemed pretty much unworkable....

So that's why Dr Nathan is in this fic so much, and why she's so concerned, and why there's so much medical information - Dr Nathan would assume that Miguel had some basic medical knowledge that would allow him to understand what she was talking about. I tried to come up with reasons why all these things would still be true if this fic was about Chico, and I can only hope I succeeded.

You had to enjoy the little things; that was Chico's philosophy for surviving prison. Fresh fruit. Clean laundry. Seeing the sky; feeling the sun on your face, just for a few seconds. Nothing good was going to happen to you in here, so you had to try and enjoy what you did get.

I think this character idea came from wawa's highlighting of Chico stealing food. I was also trying to work out how someone on a very long prison sentence survives it. I guess it must be all about managing your expectations.

The medical had been okay. He still didn't like hospitals - sitting there waiting for the doctor made him feel edgy, he'd had paranoid fantasies that someone was going to come by and grab him and stab him with a syringe full of Haldol, that he'd ticked the wrong box and they were going to put him a straightjacket and haul him off to the Connolly Institute. Once he got past the jitters, though, it had been an enjoyably boring afternoon. Lots of weird questions ("Have you ever been paid with money or drugs for sex? Have you ever visited sub-tropical Africa for longer than six months?"), and a blood test, and spit samples. They'd weighed him and measured his height and told him his blood type. The nurse took his blood pressure: could be lower, apparently. He hadn't tried to explain that prison was always kind of stressful.

I haven't finished watching Oz at the time of writing, but I've seen a lot of spoilers. One of the few things I know about Chico is that (spoiler!) he's going to have some drug-induced psychosis and self harm in the future. I kind of tried to gesture at that here by implying that Chico has some existing mental health issues.

I have no idea what kind of questions an adult male American prisoner would be asked during a medical checkup, so I just copied the questions I remember from when I donated blood. I think I was also thinking about the harm reduction checklist someone went through with me at the LGBT community centre when I was a teenager...Jeez, this whole fic is just my half-remembered ideas of harm reduction.

Is conscientiously researching your prison yaoi more disrespectful or less disrespectful to the real life victims of the carceral state than not doing much research at all? I don't know. I didn't research.

And it had been kind of nice in the X-ray room. Quiet. Soothing. Kind of dark in there, too, so the X-ray machine could work. You never saw real darkness in Em City, the city of glass, not even at night.

....Remember how I said I did approximately zero medical research for this fic? I was pretty close to finishing it before I realized that the room they control the x-ray machine from is the dark room, not the room you get the X-ray in. I don't know enough about X-rays to make up a plausible reason for why the room would be dark. I think I was thinking about MRIs, which some people claim to enjoy. I had to leave the dark room thing in so that I could establish this idea about Em City not being dark enough. Consider this my apology.

A skeleton - Chico's skeleton. He recognized the pins in his left arm, from when he slipped in the winter slush while he was getting on the bus and smashed his elbow on the kerb.

When it snows in New York in the winter, they snowplough the streets, leaving huge amounts of manky brown slush. The buses park kind of far from the curb (kerb?). So between November and April you might have to wade across a big patch of slush before you get on your bus. Check out this article with some pics. Chico: slush victim.

Dr Nathan pointed to one of the dark spots in the X-ray. "Chico, the lab sent me this after they referred it to a specialist. There are these abnormalities. Now, these aren't the typical signs of TB, and you don't show any of the signs of carrying tuberculosis. The other tests came back clear. Maybe this could be something else - cancer, some kind of fungal infection, but the specialist doesn't think so. You'll have to go back for another X-ray to confirm it, but this pattern, and the relatively low density of the objects...."

She put her finger on some other dots that were barely visible, disappearing into the darkness around his bones. "These are very distinctive, Chico."

Another pause, her eyes brimming over with that unbearable compassion.

Chico wished she would be rude to him: he'd feel more comfortable.

"We - we think it's Hanahaki disease."

"Hanahaki?" Chico asked.

"We'll need to do some more tests, but yes, it seems so," Dr Nathan said, and she sounded very sure.

"I thought Hanahaki was wiped out years ago," Chico said. He felt lost.

"Not everywhere," Dr Nathan said. "Not in prisons. It's rare," she explained - she must have been able to tell he was shocked - "but I've seen it before, multiple times. It's two to three times more common in prisons than in the general population. You were probably exposed to another infected prisoner."

Would Chico even actually need an X-ray to check if he had TB, or asymptomatic TB? I have no idea. Probably not. Anyway...

What would a world where Hanahaki disease was real be like? Wawa's original prompt said Canon/AU/Either: Either, and it also said Special Requests: Oz/prison setting preferred. I tried to write a relatively "realistic" take on Hanahaki. If Hanahaki was real, it had to be a fairly rare disease, and it had to be caused by something. If everyone naturally caught a fatal disease from being in unrequited love, we would all be dead before we were out of our teenage years, let's be real.

I liked the idea of Hanahaki being like tuberculosis - a disease that was eradicated more or less within living memory, which is now distant enough in the public consciousness to be kind of mythologized.

Like HIV, Tuberculosis is a disease we think of as being eradicated, but which still affects marginalized people. TB is significantly more common in prisons.

I wanted to write more about this - but I was worried about catching a disease myself. JK Rowling disease, where you draw insensitive parallels between fictional fantasy illnesses and real-life illnesses. I hope I gestured at the political context of ill health and sickness in prisons without being offensive or preachy.

My basic explanation of Hanahaki in this AU is that it's an infection which people carry, only developing symptoms when they experience unrequited love. Prisoners are at higher risk because some older prisoners are untreated carriers, prisoners are in close proximity to each other, and prisoners are at a significantly higher risk of developing Hanahaki symptoms due to the condition of being in prison.

Rebadow probably has boring stories that no one listens to about people dying of Hanahaki on murderer's row.

"I should start by telling you the first and best treatment for Hanahaki is to pursue a relationship with the object of your unrequited love." A beat. "That happens to be true, but also, I'm required to tell you that."

"Required?"

"It's state law," Dr Nathan sighed. "One of those weird things. The church had a lot of opinions...look, it doesn't matter. Sister Pete can facilitate some meetings between you and whoever it is, if you know who it is. Now, it doesn't work out for everybody, but..."

Wawa left a very nice comment on my fic, and in it he said "The whole bit, too, where Gloria hints at the Vatican having a stance on Hanahaki disease 🤌🤌🤌🤌🤌 Mwah, chef's kiss." I am sure the Vatican would have an opinion on Hanahaki. I'm not actually sure what their opinion would be....would they focus more on the duty of the loved one to save the life of the Hanahaki sufferer, or the duty of the Hanahaki sufferer to stoically bear their illness rather than attempt to start a sinful relationship? How would Catholics approach cases of Hanahaki involving queer desire? So I kind of regret writing in this bit about religiously-motivated Hanahaki laws...I should have thought it through more first.

"Okay," she said. "Other than that, there's symptom management. There are two main treatment protocols for slowing the progress of the disease," she said, pulling out some photocopies. "The psychological approach and the medical approach. Most patients respond best to a mix of the two."

She handed him a packet of photocopies. The words leapt out at him: AMOR y MUERTE: HANAHAKI EN TU VIDA.

I never studied Spanish in school, apart from a one-term introduction to Spanish as they speak it in Spain. I took a look at the Spanish-language material in the Wellcome Collection's online collections, but I didn't find any slogan that I felt I could adapt for this.

Amor y muerte was one of the few Spanish phrases I was confident of. The "__ en tu vida" comes from a HIV/Aids poster in the Wellcome collection that I can't find just now.

"The psychological approach is about coming to terms with your feelings, in order to reduce the symptoms and the spread of Hanahaki." She fixed him with a hard stare. "I know it sounds kooky, but multiple trials have shown that it can significantly reduce the progress of the disease, buying time for other options to work. Combined with the new medication, it can be really effective. It puts off any need for surgery."

"Why don't I want to get surgery?" Chico asked.

"You might die," Dr Nathan said, flatly.

Once again, I turn to my old discord messages:

(Again, I'm quoting from layercake's Hanahaki article)

I had not come across this idea in any of the Hanahaki fics I'd read, but I mixed it in.

I liked the idea of some superstar surgeon inventing a new and innovative Hanahaki treatment in the 60s that was eagerly taken up as a cure for this unbearable disease, but which ended up having unanticipated risks and side effects. My impression is that that does happen sometimes in medicine.

His eyes scanned over the information sheet. Meditation, journaling, self compassion, learning to understand your emotions - was he dying or was he going to the fucking spa?

"Look, doctor, I'm gonna fuckin' die anyway, right? So what's the difference?" He snapped.

"There is a difference," she said. "Thirty years ago, people used to think that surgery was the answer to this disease. A miracle cure. But the outcomes just aren't good enough. I won't use a sledgehammer to crack a nut."

In this fic, the crisis for Chico is that repressing his emotions is part of the toolkit for survival in Oz, but acknowledging and reflecting on his emotions is the recommended treatment for Hanahaki. He's kind of trapped.

"Are you taking this all in?" she asked.

Chico closed his eyes and put his head in his hands.

"Why the fuck are you telling me all this," he said. His voice sounded weird and echoey, even to himself.

I'm sorry Chico....the reason Dr Nathan is telling you all this is for the benefit of the audience. But I let you have a moment to complain about the information overload, and I came up with a reason for why she's telling you all this stuff. Unfortunately, it isn't good news for you....

"You don't have any next of kin listed in your file," Dr Nathan said.

He sat back and crossed his arms.

"So?"

"Is that correct?" she asked, starting to sound a little sarcastic.

"Is there a point to this?" Chico replied.

Always answer a question with another question was the first rule of fucking with the staff, and he felt like fucking with her a bit. She'd certainly fucked with his head.

"Yeah, you know what, there is a point," Dr Nathan said. "If you don't got a next of kin, you don't have anybody else looking out for you. That means beating this thing is up to you and me, but mostly it's up to you. Every day new patients roll in here with new things wrong with them, so I am not gonna be able to help you as much as I want. If I give you all this information," she said, "It becomes easier for you to manage your own care, and to make good decisions, and to feel good about those decisions. You got it?" Chico didn't say anything.

This is Series 4a Gloria, who is competent and takes her job seriously. I like to think that Gloria probably did some research about how to support patients with low family support/no family support after the Ryan O'Reily disaster in series 2, and Shannon's warning that no one but her cared about her husband's life. Is this the recommended approach for patients with no next of kin? I have no idea, so probably not. Is Gloria doing it right? Ehh.

Wawa comments that "It adds a whole nother layer of misfortune to the situation if Chico's avoidance of answering the question is due to something having changed and the family in Mexico and everything he keeps returning to in his thoughts being a far more distant reality. ;__;". So let me say that I don't exactly know why Chico has no next of kin: he just doesn't. Whenever someone has no next of kin, it's usually not a happy story. So Chico is refusing to answer because whatever's behind the story is painful, and he doesn't like being probed about it. He's trying to keep his emotions locked down and avoid admitting anything compromising. Anyway, he doesn't especially have a reason to make nice with Dr Nathan.

My vague notion was that Chico spent some of his childhood in Mexico (despite being an American citizen? I guess he might have been born in the US and thus had citizenship, but his parents came back and forth for a while) before settling in the US permanently. At some point, he stopped being in contact with his mother for unspecified and unknown reasons. His grandparents are old, live in rural Mexico, would find it difficult to travel to New York if there was an emergency, and would find it difficult to understand why he threw a guy off a rooftop. So he left the form blank.

I like to delude myself that my fics have Themes. Chico having no next of kin seemed to go with his sense of isolation.

"Look," Doctor Nathan said. "We don't have a lot of time. Let me try and explain what you're up against."

She pulled a pen out of the pocket of her lab coat and drew a circle on the back of an envelope.

"See this circle? It's the group of people who have Hanahaki."

He leaned in to see, interested despite himself.

She drew a line down the middle of the circle until it reached the centre, then took a sharp left turn and drew another straight line to the circle's edge.

"One third of people with Hanahaki reach conciliation - the person they love falls in love with them." She drew an arrow out and labelled it: CONCILIATION. She tapped her pen on the other part of the circle.

"Two thirds of people don't."

"Why?"

Her mouth twisted. "Could be any reason. Could be you're too old or he's too young, could be she's your brother's wife or she lives on the other side of the country now, could be she's gay or he's straight. Sometimes there is no reason - it just doesn't work. Love is funny like that."

I think I came up with the term conciliation. It's meant to sound vaguely Catholic. Why did I want it to sound vaguely Catholic? I honestly can't remember.

She tapped the circle with her pen again, on the people whose unrequited love stayed unrequited.

"Of this group," she said, "Two thirds will die."

She drew more lines, dividing up the pie chart.

"That's two-thirds of two-thirds - so, about forty percent of all the people who display symptoms."

Chico stared at the pie chart.

"That's not good," he said.

"No shit," said Dr Nathan. "One third of the dead get full-blown, stage IV, terminal Hanahaki - you know, coughing up flowers, spit and blood, the classic symptoms. Another third die from surgery or after surgery. Most of them don't actually die on the table anymore. It's those complications, those side effects. Maybe they got the surgery too early, or too late, or their body rejects the double lung transplant..."

Chico looked at her in horror.

I liked the idea that by the time you actually start coughing up flowers, it's almost too late - like how you're almost certainly going to die of rabies once you start foaming on the mouth.

Is Dr Nathan mentioning all these terrifying symptoms because she wants to scare Chico out of getting surgery, or because she's being clinical and detached and has forgotten what he's going through? Decide for yourself.

Originally the Hanahaki conciliation rate was going to be way lower. In fact....I think it's time for a little extract from my first draft, where Miguel was the Hanahaki sufferer.

"You're assuming it won't work out," Miguel says.

"The treatments available are actually really effective," she says, looking confused.

"No, no, I mean - that whoever it is, it won't work out. We'll never be together."

"Miguel..." she sighs. "Look, that's the best cure for Hanahaki. Everyone knows that - it's common sense. But trying to spontaneously bring two people together....it can be a miracle, but they call them miracles because they're rare. No one would develop Hanahaki if their feelings were reciprocated. A lot of the time, it doesn't work out." She brandishes her file folder. "Fewer than ten percent of Hanahaki cases are resolved by the subject and the object of their affection falling in love. That's not to even consider the possible risks of a match-"

"What pecentage of people who get it die from it?" Miguel interrupts.

Dr Nathan's eyes drop. "Forty-five percent."

"I'll take my chances," Miguel says. "Ten percent of fifty-five percent ain't the worst odds."

"I had you down as a lot of things, Miguel," Dr Nathan says, "But I never thought you were a fucking gambler."

He laughs at that, and so does she. He ignores the tiny tears she delicately wipes from the corners of her eyes. You have to keep your game face on, in Oz. That goes for Dr Nathan as much as the rest of them. He liked her: he didn't want to poke at the cracks in her armour.

Maybe I'll write a sequel or remix with Miguel. Anyway....

"What about the people who do survive?" he asked.

"Some of them fall out of love," she said, sighing. "Some of them have a successful surgery, and continue to comply with treatment after, and they live. Some of them manage their condition with medication and therapy for ten years or more - that's considered to be remission. And there are a couple examples in the literature of someone with early stage Hanahaki who recovered after the one they loved died. One case of someone who murdered the woman he loved, and recovered."

"Damn," Chico said. "I thought that was a myth." It's like that old movie from the Fifties, Las Flores Del Mal.

[FORESHADOWING KLAXON]

Wawa wondered if this was meant to foreshadow Chico trying to kill Miguel again (twice!) after he returned to Oz. Yes, yes it is. Once Miguel was recaptured in series 4 and Chico still wanted to kill him, and Morales thought he was being a bit weird, I knew I'd have to deal with Chico's ongoing hostility to Miguel. I went off to spoiler myself about their storyline and it turns out Chico tries to kill him!

What if, I thought to myself, this is Chico's drastic solution to Hanahaki disease...can that be reconciled with Chico being in love with Miguel? Is that too dark for what is, at the end of the day, a holiday gift exchange? So I thought I would kind of leave Chico with the idea brewing, but hoping he doesn't have to try and carry it out.

If I have any idea for a sequel, it's that Miguel finds Chico coughing up flowers after Chico tries to kill him and realizes that Chico is in love with him (because Miguel knows he's irresistible). After that, idk!

Is there anything in the Hanahaki trope about what happens if the person you're in love with dies? I'm not really familiar enough with what's out there to know. I assume that there's not usually a murder loophole.

Las Flores Del Mal is, as mentioned above, entirely invented.

"He's not in Oz. Not anymore."

He watched Gloria as she took that in. He was as important a detail as not in Oz.

"Chico..."

"I don't wanna hear what you think about it," Chico said, voice hard. "It's my life, not yours."

"I don't care about that," she said, her voice gentle. "Chico..."

He looked away. Brown eyes. Chico was always a sucker for brown eyes, and Gloria's big brown eyes were full of pity and other things he didn't want to see.

Do you know who was brown eyes? MIGUEL!!!

Chico is making a pre-emptive defense against homophobia here. In my imagination, he's bisexual or queer, aware about it, on the scene, but was still pretty firmly in the closet and is even more in the closet now because he's in prison. Is this a realistic characterization? Am I just ripping off Wawa's characterization of Chico in his fic Velvet Ropes? Or am I actually ripping off 9cbff's characterization of Ryan O'Reily in hir highly anticipated Ryan/Alonzo fic My Kind of Guy? I don't know! I think it all comes down to how free an operator Chico was on the outside, vs. how close he was to leadership. Unless El Norte had an equal opportunities policy.

"He's not dead," Chico said, still keep his face turned away from her. "At least, nobody told me."

"And he wouldn't come -"

"No," Chico interrupts. "He won't. He can't." Couldn't, wouldn't. Same thing.

This is kind of an artefact of an earlier draft in which Dr Nathan told Chico that if his loved one was dead, his Hanahaki symptoms would get better. Although actually, I think it's an artefact of something else entirely...I think this is a good time to mention that I think I was subconsciously influenced by soulmate/soulmark fics, rather than Hanahaki fics, while I was writing this, because I've read a lot more of them. Specifically, I think I was influenced by a Blake's 7 fic, 'as if we were fools by heavenly compulsion' by x_los. It's a series of different, somewhat unconventional takes on the soulmate/soulmark/soulbond trope, including one chapter that I thought was really great way back when, in which one character knows another character he's separated from isn't dead because his soulmark hasn't gone grey. Of course, that whole thing shouldn't come in to this fic at all, and if I'd been more alert on I would have rewritten this bit to get rid of that trace of influence....

"If you wanna talk-" Dr Nathan stopped. "I'm not really that kind of doctor," she said reluctantly, "But I get it. Talk to me, if you don't want to talk to Sister Pete. Or try the Hanahaki support group. They meet on Sundays."

Originally, Chico was going to realize that Doctor Nathan had taken the Cleeraflor pills out of her own handbag, and that she was suffering from Hanahaki too. But then I realized that this would make no sense. Dr Nathan has a lot of problems but Ryan O'Reily not being in love with her is not one of them. Maybe he's dying from Hanahaki offscreen!

In Las Flores Del Mal, Jorge Mistral is in love with María Félix, but she doesn't even know his name. She's a singer or an actress or something like that, and he's a nobody from the poor part of town. He loves her, but he hates her because when he tries to get close to her she just walks by him. So he pretends to be rich so he can get close enough to her to kill her, because it's the only way to save his own life. At least, until she starts to fall in love with him.

I know very little about Mexican cinema, so I spent a while clicking through wikipedia pages for films from the Golden Age of Mexican Cinema to try and find a plot I could adapt. In the end I made one up. María Félix and Jorge Mistral are both real actors. They did act with each other in the movie Camelia, which must have been my vague inspiration for this fictional movie....at least, the link's been clicked on and it sounds about right

The idea of having a fictional glamorous old movie that reflects the themes of the story is stolen from Kiss of the Spider Woman.

In the end, Mistral dies in her arms. Or does she die in his arms?

Maybe they both die. Chico couldn't remember. He saw it in black and white on his grandmother's old TV when he was a little kid, and he hadn't seen it since.

This is based directly on my memory of visiting my granny's house. She had a colour TV, but she didn't have all the channels, so me and my brother spent a lot of time watching the children's programming bloc on RTÉ One until Neighbours came on and we had to switch over. I think that usually there was a film on in the afternoon, maybe on RTÉ Two. I couldn't tell you a thing about any of the films; obviously my memory isn't as good as Chico's!

He wished he could sleep. You couldn't sleep in here, not really. It's never dark enough, not even when you close your eyes. Not like the darkness he remembers from when he was a child, staying with relatives in the countryside. At night, the darkness was so heavy that you couldn't tell the difference when you opened and closed your eyes. He had never slept as well anywhere else as when he was there. Not before, not since.

In my imagination, Chico spent quite a bit of time staying at his grandmother's house when he was a kid. Maybe his parents were working in America.

As Chico sat down on his bunk in his pod, he wondered what he was feeling. Sad, he decided. Sad, and a little bit afraid. Everybody was born to die, yes; sooner or later everybody's time would come, yes; but that didn't mean he had to be thrilled that it was his time and his turn.

Another Chico headcanon: He's probably been in a lot of anger management classes and courses and things like that where they teach you how to understand that you have feelings and you can tell them apart. I think he's applying that here.

The phrase "born to die" is from the song All My Trials. I started listening to this Joan Baez album a lot last year for the first time, and she does a really striking version of that song.

He'd realized sometime during that long, long night after Miguel escaped that he was going to miss him. Miss him, even though they'd hated each other; miss him, even though he should hate him still. And he knew himself well enough to understand why.

Chico was not even going to think about what might happen if Miguel could love him back, because that was never gonna happen. Miguel had a girlfriend, he'd had a son: was not going to suddenly become somebody who could fall in love with Chico. That didn't happen to people like him. That shit was for romance novels, and dumb movies on HBO.

I'm given to understand that HBO was a bit of a pioneer in LGBTQ+ representation on US TV. Although Oz is part of that, so it's a bit of a paradox....I was kind of thinking of the movie I Love You Phillip Morris as an example of a gay movie that could have been on HBO, but it turns out it didn't come out till 2009 and HBO weren't involved. Also, I totally had the wrong idea of the plot and there are no straight guys falling in love in it. Oops!

It occurred to him that Miguel could be dead by now.

It also occurred to him that it would make everything easier if he was.

If Chico ever sees Miguel again, he doesn't know what he might do. What he might have to do.

Well, we know how that worked out! The AU of this fic is that Hanahaki exists, not that the events of Oz are significantly different as a result. Maybe Miguel doesn't find out Chico has Hanahaki until after they reconcile...

I do think Miguel will reciprocate Chico's love eventually. He's just not there yet! He's "walking for miles through the desert and living off snake's eggs and handfuls of dry grass", to quote draft 1, and is thus a little bit preoccupied. He'll come around...

I don't really have a conclusion. That was the DVD commentary for Cythera!

I couldn't have written this fic without the enthusiasm and encouragement of the Oz Magi discord, or trillingstar's efforts to keep this whole cool event running. So thank you everyone :))

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