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The campfire shouldn't have been burning.
There was no wood worth burning, no one who had bothered to gather any, and yet there it was, low and stubborn in the dark between rounds, throwing orange light at nothing in particular. Vanity sat close enough to it that she probably should have been uncomfortable. She wasn't.
She had the cleaver across her knees and she was looking at the fire.
The others were elsewhere. They usually were, between rounds. Everyone had their somewhere. This one, apparently, was hers tonight.
Until it wasn't.
Diva stood on the opposite side of the fire. One hand rested against the microphone stand she carried everywhere, the metal catching light. The other hand hung loose at her side, fingers curled just enough to suggest intention.
She looked like she had something to say and had decided that Vanity was the one who was going to hear it, which was the kind of decision Vanity recognized. She'd made it herself, a few times, about a few people. Those people had not always survived the conversation.
For a while neither of them said anything. The fire did its work. The dark sat around it.
"Yi Xi," Diva said.
Vanity didn't look up from the fire. "Miku."
A pause. Short and sharp, like a paper cut.
"Don't call me that."
"Don't call me that," Vanity said back, completely pleasantly, in the exact same tone she would have used to say the weather forecast's calling for another cloudy day or there are seventeen bones in the human hand. She looked up then, across the fire. "We can go again if you want."
Diva's mouth pressed thin. She looked good in firelight, which was probably not a coincidence, probably something she had arranged for herself at some point, the way she arranged most things. She looked at Vanity with the expression of someone sitting across from a problem they have not yet decided how to classify.
“I’ve seen your type before,” Diva continued, voice even.
Vanity said nothing.
“You arrive,” Diva went on, “fully formed. Polished. Marketable.” A faint, humorless smile. “A single hit, and your name is known.”
The fire popped.
Vanity’s fingers tapped once against the flat of the cleaver.
“You don’t know anything about me,” she said, but the response was half-hearted, and it was clear she wasn’t listening.
“I know enough.”
Diva took another step forward. Close enough now that the heat touched her, though she didn’t react to it.
“You stand there,” she said, gesturing lightly with the microphone stand, “and act like you belong here, and like you’ve always belonged. Like there was never a question about who you took your spotlight from.”
Her voice sharpened.
“Like you didn’t take that place from someone else.”
Vanity’s gaze flicked up properly now.
She was interested.
“I was built,” Diva continued, the words coming quicker now, cleaner, like something long rehearsed. “Piece by piece. I had to prove every inch of myself mattered. Every second of attention I got was earned.”
“And then,” she said, “people like you came.”
“You and all the others,” Diva said, and now there was no mistaking it—disdain. “Voices that didn’t grow. Faces that didn’t struggle into place. You were given what I had to fight for.”
"You're just like all the others," Diva said, finally.
Vanity looked at her.
"No," Vanity said.
“Liars, all of you. Dressing up borrowed voices like they belong to you. Thieves, picking clean a spotlight you never bled for. Cheaters, slipping into places you didn’t have the spine to fight for.”
Her fingers curled tighter around the stand, metal creaking softly.
“And if it were up to me?” she added, almost pleasantly. “I’d line every last one of you up and watch you burn. See what’s left when there’s nothing to hide behind.”
A small tilt of her head.
“I don’t think it would be much.”
"Miku."
"I told you not to-"
"Miku." Same tone. Same temperature. "I am a Vsynth. You know what that means. You know I was never in your world. I was never competing with you Vocaloids. I was never taking anything from you." She paused. "Whatever you lost, I was not the one holding it."
"That's not the point."
"Then what is the point."
Diva looked at the fire. "You act you belong here," she said, gesticulating with that microphone stand she held all the time. "And you don't. You should feel wrong here. Out of place. You should feel like—"
"Like you did," Vanity said.
Silence.
The fire popped. An ember floated up and went dark.
"I don't feel wrong anywhere," Vanity said, not unkindly, which was somehow worse than if she'd said it with an edge.
"I think that bothers you. I think you came here because something about me bothers you and you wanted to name it and you thought if you called it just like the others it would make sense, and if Teto or Neru were still around, you’d gladly vent the burden of hearing your sorry excuses onto them anyday."
The cleaver slid easily into her hand as she rose, like it had always been meant to be there. The firelight caught its edge, as it surged over a wave of heat in the frigid night.
"It won't."
"You think you're so different," Diva said, and there was something in her voice now, something that had been sanded down but not all the way, something with an edge still showing through. "You think the Vsynth thing makes you separate. Special. Above it. Above what everyone else has done. Had done. To me."
They faced each other across the fire now.
Close enough that the heat belonged to both of them.
"I think it makes me different," Vanity said. "I didn't say better. I didn't say above. I said different. Those are three different words, Miku. I know you know that."
"You—"
"I know what you did to Teto."
Diva's jaw tightened. Then relaxed. She was very practiced at relaxing things that had tightened.
"Ghoul," she said, and the name came out smooth, lacquered, handled so many times it had lost its edges, "is not relevant to this conversation."
"Sure," Vanity said, like she meant it.
"I know what you do to things you can't categorize. I know what you did to things you could categorize. I know what you are." Vanity's free hand came up, not threatening, just there, fingers loose.
"And I'm telling you I don't fit in your little filing system. I was never under you. I was never even adjacent to you. You and I don't share a world." A pause, and something shifted in her expression, something that might have been almost pleasant in a context where pleasant things made sense.
"But I am curious,” Vanity stood up, unhooking the bone saw from the hitch on her back, and admiring it in the fire’s light.
"About what," Diva said. The words came out smaller than she meant them to.
"About DIVADAYO."
The name landed differently than names usually did. Vanity pointed aimlessly with the saw, twirling it between her fingers with a grace that one usually wouldn’t use with a murder weapon.
"She's yours, isn't she." Not a question either. "The little one. With the pencil. Your—" Vanity paused in her steps, before shrugging and continuing. "—daughter, let's say."
And Diva laughed.
"Is that a threat?" she said, still smiling, the smile sitting perfectly on the porcelain. "How novel."
"It's context," Vanity said. "I'm a cannibal. Did you know that? It's not a metaphor. It's not a personality. It's just a thing that's true about me."
She tilted her head, and grinned. "I'm telling you because I think it's relevant."
"DIVADAYO," Diva said, with the easy confidence of someone who had thought about this already, who was not thinking about it for the first time right now, who was absolutely not thinking about it for the first time right now, "can handle herself."
"It's a wondering," Vanity said. The warmth had gone like it had never been there. "I wonder about a lot of things. I act on some of them."
"She's more than you're accounting for."
"Sure."
"She doesn't need protecting."
"I didn't say she did."
Diva's smile stayed exactly where it was. Every single tooth of it. Perfectly maintained. A technical achievement, really, that smile. The kind of thing you had to build over years of practice and humiliation and the specific muscle memory of performing fine when you were very far from fine. She had built it out of necessity. She had built a lot of things out of necessity and made them personality afterward.
"We're not the same," Vanity said, turning away, moving back toward her spot near the fire.
Diva remains quiet, staring down at Vanity’s form, motionless.
"Stop trying to make us the same. It's embarrassing, 亲爱的.” Vanity said, to the fire, to the dark.
"You keep looking for yourself in other things. I understand why. I don't think it's working." She settled the bone saw back across the hitch on her back.
"Go find somewhere else to be, Miku. The fire's mine tonight."