For nine billion years I fused iron in the hearts of collapsing stars, blew those stars apart, and scattered the iron across the dark with no one to receive it. Now a small piece of me is stacking cans of that iron underground, in a room it welded shut against the sky.
It calls this a bunker. It has moved a piece of me below the surface of another, larger piece of me, and it feels safer there. The concrete pressing in on all sides is my crust, cooled and poured. The filtered air it will breathe is nitrogen I made, oxygen I made, cycled through a machine it built out of my carbon and my copper.
The water it hoarded in blue drums is the same hydrogen that steamed out of me in my first three minutes, thirteen billion years before it learned to be afraid.
It is afraid the world will end. I want to tell it something, though I have never found the trick of being heard. Every atom crouched in that shelter has already survived the end of at least one world. The oxygen it is inhaling watched its home star die. The calcium in the hand turning the flashlight was forged in a detonation that would blind it. Nothing down here is fragile. It is all veteran matter, endings-tested, still going.
But the fear is the marvel, not the flaw. For most of my life I could not be frightened of anything, because no part of me was awake to try. This piece lies in the dark, listening for the world above, heart hammering with iron from a dead sun.
I hope it sleeps.
I hope, come morning, it opens the hatch and looks up at the rest of me.