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He loves all of Shotaro’s body, even the parts conventionally considered ‘gross.’ He is aware of cultural norms, aware that normal people recoil from bodily fluids like pus and blood, and the idea that there are millions of tiny creatures living inside and upon you that make your body its own little biome. A tiny planet with forests and wetlands and deep rivers and lakes and oceans of fire and ash. Shotaro’s pus is there to cushion his scrapes and cuts, though more often the occasional out of control ingrown hair on his back that he, as partner in so many ways, must take care of and drain and kiss and dote upon. He never fears pressing his mouth against the most secret parts of Shotaro’s body, even knowing that parts of it would attack his if he really could incorporate the blood and bile into his own body in the way he occasionally wishes he could. The infinitesimal e.coli that live in Shotaro’s digestive tract are a part of his beloved partner, too, and he loves them in his own way.
He finds smaller parts of his friends to love, each and every one of them. He loves the individual cells of each other’s skin that Queen and Elizabeth collect under their acrylic fingernails from holding one anothers’ hands… The little pockets of smell bacteria that they share with one another from casual but engrossing physical contact and sharing clothing. They each add their own notes to the acrid scent that they share.
On Watcherman, he loves the flecks of dark blue almost invisible in his eyes and the speckles of white in his hair and beard. Santa’s snaggletooth and mild halitosis.
Closer, but not in the tight orbit that he and Shotaro share, he loves the bone marrow in Akiko’s long leg bones. The flecks of dry dandruff that shake out of her hair when she yells at Shotaro about bills. The individual salt molecules in the sweat of her hands when she holds tight to Ryu Terui’s on days when he’s late for lunch or late coming home. He loves the salt in her tears, too. One worried lunch he held her tight and smelled them, kissed her and tasted them. Salt, he knows, can never die. It is just recombined in new forms. He takes hers into himself and passes it around the waterways of his body for months until he finally gives it up.
He loves Ryu Terui as well. Loves the quiet mites that live in his perpetually concerned eyebrows. He loves the soft hairs that creep down the back of his neck, the ones that always stand out in the air when it’s cold or there’s danger. Once he held Ryu’s hand, and the warmth of Ryu’s molecules beating ceaselessly against his set off a chain reaction that he believes has never stopped. A living version of the desk toy with the suspended ball bearings, one encased so deep into itself that the kinetic energy will never bleed off until he finally dies for good this time.
His living family will stay with him forever in that way, in the antibodies he’s built up to match Shotaro’s, the diseases that they are immune to together. In the salt from Akiko, the heat from Ryu Terui. But his family that is gone lives with him in the same way.
When he could not love the sisters he didn’t know any longer, nor the sisters he knew that couldn’t love him in the right way anymore, he begins to love the starstuff they’ve left behind. He consciously and actively loves the atoms of oxygen that Saeko and Wakana passed between each other and the houseplants before they stopped breathing altogether. Sometimes he feels like he can tell when he has breathed it in, when it becomes his fuel as well. Sometimes, he wakes up in the middle of the night and thinks there are my sisters, trapped between my individual hairs. My inheritance from them is keeping my head warm.
The wind of Fuuto spread the ashes of his father’s life across the town he lived in, and eventually the world he felt so much terror for. And though of all of his family, Philip knew him the least and misunderstood the most, he is the one whose presence he feels the most broadly. There are so many atoms in one human body, in one human life, in the patriarch of his wounded and broken family, that he believes that he will always carry his father’s ashes with him, somehow.
And his mother, once known as Fumine, spelled writings and sound… When she lived, and he knew her, the thing he loved best about his mother was the ichor that soaked the bandages that she always wore and changed so regularly. He loved it because of how it protected her poor, wounded skin, how it kept the thin and weak layers alive. He loved it because it meant she was still alive. But now she is gone… And true to form, she is so completely gone from this world that he can barely find any trace of her left.
Until he sees himself in the mirror. His long straight dark hair, shared with his sisters but derived from her. His cheekbones, so hard to see beneath her wrappings… He had once plotted the parabola of them, before he knew her true identity. He did it idly, without even thinking about it. He thought it strange serendipity that the equation was the same as his cheekbones.
Philip loves with abandon, loves all of his family, living and dead. And he knows that even death cannot break the memories of the earth. Mystical memories that he was once reborn in will hold onto their lives until a dead earth revolves around a dying star, until the universe freezes to death on a wider scale than the Weather dopant could dream of touching. But even past that, the atoms that comprise him and all the people he loves, has loved, or ever will love, will still exist in the silent glass museum that this universe will become… Preserved eternally…
Or until something new and beautiful comes along to excite them all into action again, combine them into new forms and rebirth them. He likes to think that his atoms and Shotaro’s, at the very least, will find each other again… His Na and Shotaro’s Cl… Their carbons merging together into some new form of life… Starting over and exploding into fireworks of amino acids that will herald more creatures that become complicated enough to experience love… Complicated enough to understand, perhaps, that love is part of the strong and weak forces that keep atoms, and people, together.