#itsqueermrmarvin

Dust and Ashes, Natasha, Pierre, and the Great Comet of 1812 -> Phil Connors, Groundhog Day

Well, the description of the “my buttons” tag on my about page is:

My tastes in fiction are somewhat twisted and tend to involve pain, suffering, torture, executions and psychological torment. I tag posts involving my glee over these and similar subjects with this so you can block it if that wigs you out.

That’s the gist of it; if I’m talking about my buttons, it’s because something hit the region of my brain that lights up instantly at particular subjects, tropes, etc. in fiction, mostly involving characters going through physical and/or emotional hell in some form. Instead of (well, often alongside) appreciating something intellectually for some specific, well-defined reasons, it's more like I just have this button on me that activates my dopamine circuit, and the thing just pressed it, hence the terminology.

I always feel a little weird describing it to people who might not instantly "get it”, because it sounds like a sadism or schadenfreude sort of thing, which is decidedly not what it’s about. If I can’t stand a character and want them to suffer for how terrible they are, and then they do, it might be viscerally satisfying, but that’s not my buttons and involves entirely different emotions. It’s more like an intense empathy thing. My favorite thing about fiction is exploring plausible human psychology under stress, often in extreme and horrifying situations, in an imaginary form where no one actually gets hurt - imagining how somebody who appears tough might eventually break after going through untold horrors, how a believable character might react to unusual, impossible, nightmarish scenarios and how their mind handles what’s going on, while understanding and empathizing with it every step of the way (can you tell why I like Groundhog Day and in particular the way the musical emphasizes showing Phil’s emotional arc better and more coherently, cough). Perhaps they make choices that are horrible, but which make sense to their mind at that moment after everything they’ve just been through, and I want to feel that it makes sense to them, to understand exactly why they’re making this awful choice and have my heart break for them in that moment.

one more attempt. However, he doesn’t actually die this time and wakes up in a hospital bed. For once, it hits him how real his body and what he’s been doing to it truly is. He’s pissed at himself for falling back into this and doubts if he’ll ever be able to just look on the bright side like Rita said to. To his surprise, before the day resets, his mom shows up at the hospital to see him, having urgently booked a flight over there. She’s pretty angry and scared and upset and gives him some harsh words, and she also loves him so, so much. They talk and she stays with him until it’s 6AM again.

why do you make me hurt him so. anyways this was a doozy but also weirdly fun to write mostly because i just got my EMT certification and am therefore allowed to throw in useless medical jargon

(again sorry mrs. connors you don’t deserve this)

send me fic prompts here!

CW for suicide mention/attempt

It’s impossible to put into words just how much Phil despises the inventor of the alarm clock.

“That’s right, woodchuck-chuckers, it’s-”

He slams his hand down onto the snooze button.

He’s never been a morning person.

Lately, his days look a little like this: sit up, stretch. Answer the phone on the first ring. Make sure to get the girl’s name- it’s Lisa- and wish her a good morning before heading out the door. Compliment Jonathan’s new sneakers, fix the coffee pot, meet up with Ned to chat about his family.

Then, get coffee for the crew and Rita, do the broadcast, change a flat tire, rescue a cat. Practice the piano, charm his way into staying a few extra hours.

Try to save the old man.

Fail to save the old man.

Drive Ralph and Gus back from the bar.

Wake up, do it all over again.

And, like, okay, it’s not all bad.  

Phil’s a new man, with a new lease on life and a steadily improving rendition of Hot Cross Buns to prove it. The more time he spends here actually living, the more he grows to love each and every resident of Punxsutawney.

He has friends here, as bizarre as that sounds.

Even if those friends don’t, y'know, remember him.-Here’s the thing: sometimes, his life feels like the weird second act of some two-bit play. The fact that the curtain will never fall is irrelevant.

Helping people of this small, quiet town should be enough. 

It is enough.

In terms of eternity, he’s won the fucking jackpot.-Still, it goes without saying that some days are easier than others.

“That’s right, woodchuck-chuckers, it’s-”

"That’s right, woodchuck-chuckers, it’s-”

That’s right, woodchuck-chuckers, it’s-”

He’s getting better.

He is.

It’s just, well. Sometimes.

Sometimes, he isn’t.

Here’s another thing: Phil spends the night before his seventeenth birthday locked in his parents’ bathroom with a bottle of his mom’s sleeping pills and a flask of gas station tequila he’d bribed off of his sister’s boyfriend a month earlier. 

He’s sixteen years, three hundred sixty four days, twenty two hours, and seventeen minutes old. 

People keep telling him that it’s going to get better, that he’ll be okay, that his problems are small and that everyone feels like this every once in a while. 

Maybe they’re right, but Phil’s not stupid, either- he knows that people aren’t supposed to be this empty, knows that there’s something in him that’s always going to be small and broken and wrong.

He’s just so fucking tired.

"That’s right, woodchuck-chuckers, it’s-”

Twenty three years and a thousand endless days later, he barely thinks twice before swallowing the whole damn bottle.

Phil wakes up.

He wakes up.

He’s not in the bed and breakfast.

For one panicked moment, he thinks maybe-

He jack-knifes up, yanks the cannula out of his nose. “Excuse me!”

There’s a nurse passing by his room. She turns, looks at him with a special cocktail of muted pity and vague disgust, which Phil very politely ignores because he is a nice fucking person now, thank you very much.

“Sorry, but um,” he rasps, voice hoarse. It sort of tastes like something crawled into the back of his throat and died. “What’s today’s date?“ 

“February 2nd, dear. I’ll go tell the doctor that you’re up.”

February 2nd.

Right.

He wakes up again to a woman in a white coat standing at the foot of his bed, reading off of a clipboard. 

“Phil Connors, 40, found unresponsive underneath a bridge near Patsy’s Park. Presented with mild hypothermia, bradycardia, hypotension, and significant respiratory depression as a result of an alcohol potentiated benzodiazepine overdose." 

Phil just wants to go back to sleep.

“ER administered 0.8mg of Flumazenil intravenously upon admission and performed a gastric lavage shortly after. Vitals have been stable since seven this evening.”

“Huh,” he mutters. “Thought it’d been longer than that." 

His doctor sighs, like she’s unimpressed or something, which strikes him as kind of rude.

Phil almost died.

God.

"Mr. Connors, you went outside half naked in the middle of snowstorm to chase 220 mg of clonazepam- that’s fifty five pills, by the way- with a bottle of raspberry vodka-”

“It was grape, actually-”

“Regardless,” she says and, great, her voice is all gentle now, like being nice is going to change anything. “I don’t think we need to pretend that this was accidental.”

“Shit, what gave it away?" 

"Mr. Connors, was this your first attempt?”

And Phil-

Phil thinks of the toaster.

He thinks of suffocating, of bleeding out, of freezing to death, of walking into traffic, eyes shut, over and over and over again. He remembers the rope and the car battery and the fucking clock tower.

He thinks of the screwdriver- and, okay, that had been a little excessive, but whatever.

He feels sick.

"Yeah,” he says, slumping back against the pillows. “Yeah. First time.”

They keep him on mandatory 72 hour watch.

Not that it really matters, but.

Phil hates hospitals.

The phone rings when Phil’s on his seventh episode of Law and Order: SVU. He’s eaten, like, four things of green Jello and an entire bag of ice chips. 

On screen, Ice-T is arresting a pedophile with a clown fetish.

He’s pretty sure his nurse is avoiding him.

This kind of feels like a new low.

“Mr. Connors? You have a visitor. Should I send her up?”

Phil absolutely does not want to see Rita right now, but also feels like he owes her for blowing off the broadcast and then literally almost dying. 

Plus, he’s been trying to be less of an ass lately.

Really.

“Yeah, go ahead,” he says with a sigh. “Thank you.”

“Phil Connors, what the fuck.”

That’s not Rita.

He’s going to kill Rita.

“Mom? Jesus, who called you?”

“Is that how you greet me? We haven’t spoken in six months, and all I get is a Jesus-who-called-you?”

Joanne Connors is sixty four years old and 5'2”. 

She carries herself the way some people carry machine guns. 

“So, I’m in a hospital bed, don’t know if you noticed-"

"I noticed that you look like shit,” she says, scowling at the IV in Phil’s arm like it’s done something to  personally offend her. “So, I’ll reiterate: what the fuck.”

Phil’s been nursing a low level migraine since he woke up and the shrillness of his mother’s voice adds a special new dimension to this whole experience.

“Thanks, mom,” he says with a sigh. “Did you really fly all the way out here from Cleveland?”

“No, I was in the area,” she says bitingly. “Of course I flew out here. Your producer called-”

“Associate producer, actually-” he says, just because he’s feeling a little bitter.

“-saying that you were in the hospital, that it looked bad, that they found these pills-”

“I’m fine, oh my god-”

“-so, yes, I did fly out here in the middle of a goddamn blizzard. That flight cost me five hundred dollars, by the way-”

“I never asked you to-”

“-and that doctor you have is a real piece of work-”

“Mom! You’re yelling." 

She stops abruptly, looking stricken. 

With horror, Phil realizes that her eyes are welling up. 

He hates seeing his mom cry.

"You stupid, stupid boy,” she whispers. “You selfish, thoughtless child. What were you thinking?”

Phil can’t remember the last time his mother hugged him, but when she does, it feels like china, like glass, like something breakable and precious all at once.  

“Mom, I-”

He doesn’t know what he wants to say. 

There’s something ugly in his chest, some horrible emotion that makes his throat tight and his eyes burn. He can feel his mother’s tears seeping into the flimsy fabric of his hospital gown.

Phil grips her back like he’s drowning.

Eventually she pulls away, dabs at her eyes with a trembling hand.

“I’m so sorry,” she says. “Phil, I’m so sorry.”

“Um. Don’t be. This isn’t your fault,” he says thickly, scrubbing a hand across his face. “I just- uh. It’s been a long day.”

She chuckles weakly. “Do you want to talk about it?”

Phil doesn’t want to talk about it, and for once, she doesn’t push.

They just sit there instead, watching crappy crime procedurals and eating Jello. She tells him blatantly untrue stories about his childhood and pretends to be interested when he delivers a ten minute lecture on introductory quantum mechanics (his newest research project) and a half hour summary of the first four seasons of Game of Thrones (that he only watched for Rita).

At one point, she leans over to press a kiss to his forehead.

“I love you so much, Phil. So much.”

He closes his eyes.

Here’s a final thing: the day always resets in the time it takes him to blink. 

In that brief moment or space between seeing and not-seeing, a cosmic rubber band yanks him backwards, pulls him taut through time. He knows it’s happening before it happens, even though he’s never actually seen the clock hit six.

"That’s right, woodchuck-chuckers, it’s-”

He slams a hand on the alarm.

and smart and she doesn't take anyone's shit and she kinda reminds him of Rita. And then we get to the Beast who's this angry entitled immature jerk at first but then it turns out he's all isolated and self-hating and afraid of losing his humanity for good and Phil is like "oh shit that's me". And by the time he gets to the ballroom scene he's totally emotionally invested and he tears up at the line "bittersweet and strange, finding you can change, learning you were wrong".