For nine billion years I ran fusion in the dark with nobody to hear the hum. Now forty thousand of my pieces are packed into a muddy field, and they have arranged for the air to shudder in patterns, and they are all shuddering back on purpose.
Look at what they did. They took carbon I cooked in a red giant's belly, threaded it into throats and larynxes, and one piece stands on a raised platform pushing that air into waves, and every other piece feels the wave land in the small bones of the ear (iron-trace, calcium, my old wreckage) and decides, without being asked, to move.
In time. Together. The hydrogen from my first three minutes is sweating out of them and steaming off their shoulders into the evening. They are drinking water that is older than every star, out of crushed cans, and calling it warm and complaining.
I watched one piece near the back, not dancing. Just standing with its eyes closed and its face tilted up, letting the low frequencies push on its ribs, and I recognized the ribs. Curved iron and stardust, cage around a heart I spent a very long time being unable to build. Now it holds the beat inside it and does not know it is holding anything.
They think they came for the music. They came to stand shoulder to shoulder and feel a part of me touch another part of me and both parts light up.
The last song is ending. Soon they will scatter across the dark field toward small metal shelters and sleep. I only hope, before they close their eyes, that a few of them look up, and see the rest of me still burning, and understand we are the same thing, briefly awake in two places at once.