[berlin] now speak of anger | • m i h a

The warm afternoon sun gave everything a yellowish glow on the streets of wizarding Berlin. Meike relished the summer warmth; she didn’t mind the cold as much as some of her peers (really, the girl had come to expect it after five years at Durmstrang), but it was always nice to come home and remember that the rest of the world wasn’t actually the same dark, dreary dirty grey and white Durmstrang was. In Berlin, there was colour. Today, however, there seemed to be a lot more colour than usual.

Meike hung back, leaning her skinny frame against the brick wall of a cauldron shop as waves of people passed her by. She could make out the words on the signs they were carrying; they said things about the stupidity of blood purity and made references to other parts of Germany’s history where things like that had mattered. The girl hadn’t known that this would get so big, but she did wonder if it was a reaction to things that had happened in Durmstrang. Half of Germany went to Durmstrang and the other half went to Beauxbatons; Meike had cousins at the French school who learned things like music and dance rather than necromancy. She wrinkled her nose at the thought.

People moved all around her; chanting various things. The anti-purity blood status rally was in full swing. Meike folded her arms and hoped things didn’t get too messy.

"PURE BLOOD ~ NOT US!" Mihaela joined the chant with a fist in the air, despite actually being a Pureblood Mihaela had never really minded one way or the other. Not until the events of this year anyway. The headmistress was kind of insane and things had spiralled out of control rather quickly. Having witnessed, and even kind of taken part, in the death of a muggleborn student from Koldovstoretz Mihaela's perspective had begun to change. She thought people were generally good but the events of that night had changed that. The students she had been hanging around hadn't physically pushed the kid out of the tower but they minds well have. They bullied him into a corner and then pretended like they were sad when he fell out the window. Mihaela felt an immeasurable about of guilt and coming to things like this helped her cope with it. With red war paint covering half of her face and an over sized black tee said "Magic > Blood" on the back the Romanian witch was ready to march on... where ever they were headed. She was in it for the shouting, not really for the details after all.

She moved with the group down the streets of Berlin and continued to shout until she saw someone in the crowd she recognized. Jumping out of her place in the march she bounded toward Meike as her combat boots splashed through street puddles. "Meike come on!" She shouted, pulling the other girl into the parade and leading her back toward the front where the parading people with picket signs were. "I didn't know you was bout' to be here but I'm glad you are." She gave a nod toward a burly wizard with a graying beard she'd just become friends with not two minutes ago and reached into his rucksack to return with a folded picket sign to hand to her friends. It had a Dragon on it and some German words about how a dragon can still breath fire no matter how pure its blood was.

Tossing it toward Meike with very little warning she said "Here!" at the last minute, just as the throngs of people behind them began to march just a little bit faster. The drummers at the front of the lines had picked up the tempo as a Bulgarian witch began to sing. Mihaela barely understood the words, promptly forgetting Bulgarian every summer until they returned to school and she had to remember. She pointed toward what was written on the sign she'd thrown at her friend and then shouted over the crowd. "Creatures don't care about blood status why should we?" It was pretty much how she had been raised. 

"Zgryptors eat'cha no matter how pure your blood is, Strigoi don't give a damn who your parents are."

Meike hadn’t expected to see her yearmate here in Berlin. There weren’t a whole lot of Durmstrang students in Germany - not compared to the overall Durmstrang population, anyway. She didn’t see a lot of people from school, especially not just by accident. Suddenly she found herself being dragged into the fray. “Miha?” The brunette was totally puzzled. “What are you doing in Germany?” Meike shook her head, then repeated herself in Russian rather than her native German tongue. “What are you doing in Germany?” Meike hadn’t seen Mihaela for months - not since term had ended in the catastrophic way things tended to end at Durmstrang. She followed her friend - or rather, was dragged by her friend - through the busy crowd. “What…?” Meike just stared as Mihaela pressed a sign into her hands. She glanced at it for a moment, noting the dragon illustration, before looking back up at her friend.

A part of her was amused; of course Mihaela was here, screaming about justice to the world. She was a fickle sort of girl with transient passions, but when she was dedicated to something, Mihaela could be a force to be reckoned with. Her passion was fiery. The crowd was loud, chanting louder and louder and Meike was sure there was going to be a scuffle or some kind of passionate property destruction happening any moment now. “My parents would kill me,” she said over the drums. Meike wondered vaguely what Moritz would think about it all. As a pureblood from a pureblooded family, Meike did feel a little uncomfortable. Like an imposter.

"What do you mean? I'm here for the rally?" She replied quickly, missing the point and moving on quickly with a toss of her hair and a smile. "What'choo doing here?" She asked next with her typical refusal to use proper grammar. Swaying with music that wasn't really good for dancing Miha handed her friend the sign and then gave her more of an explanation. "A girl from that Frenchie school told me about the whole thing, she's here some place dunno' where though...." Mihaela had promptly lost the girl she'd accompanied to this protest pretty much the minute that they had arrived. Each of them went their own way and to be honest Miha had zero clue how she was going to get home.

Still marching forward Mihaela pumped her fist into the air again as the chanting around them resumed. The crowd was surging forward and she was eating up every moment of it. The Romanian fire ball lived for moments like these when tensions were high, everything was too loud and too close, it was her bread and butter. She felt most uncomfortably when things were slow and steady. She hated quiet rooms and calm moments. "They don't know your here do they?" She asked back, walking and talking at the same time with ease. "What they don't know ain't gonna' hurt them..." She wondered for a moment what her own parents would think about her being her. They had raised her to be pretty open minded but at the end of the day they were like basically everyone else in their village: set in their ways.

Thinking about her village made her miss her family and especially Lev who happened to be spending the summer there. Her father got him a job just after she had decided to ship out to the summer school and she actually kind of regretted going. She knew she wouldn't of really been able to hang out with Lev, he was working, but it was still cool to have another friend in the village. "Come on protest with me Meike!" She shouted before returning to chanting as they walked. "PUREBLOOD ~ NOT US!" She urged her more reserved friend to join in on the screaming by giving her a look, emphasizing each word with the narrowing of her eyes on Meike.

“Yeah but… we’re in Germany?” Meike paused, “how did you even get here?” She knew about her friend’s family and the place she was from. That town sounded like a bit of a death trap, to be honest. A part of her wanted to tell Mihaela that she’d been practicing her punching over the past year; that she was confident that she could take her down in a fight now, but it didn’t seem like the right time to bring it up. Meike shook her head, not sure that she was going to get any sort of straight answer from her friend. Some German girl from Beauxbatons had told her to be here? Okay. Meike was fine to run with that.

The crowd was surging forward, caught in some kind of mob-mentality swell of passion. Even cool-headed Meike had to admit that it was pretty intoxicating. She wasn’t fist-pumping or screaming like her friend was, but she found herself keeping up with the pace and the excited energy around her. “No they don’t, but I should probably look out for reporters…” Meike glanced around quickly, but did feel very safe in the crowd. Her ministry internship and almost-guaranteed job there would probably be threatened by her attendance at a thing like this. “Are we marching toward the ministry building?” She asked distantly, not sure if Miha could hear her.

“We are pureblooded,” Meike said to her friend, amused at the whole PUREBLOOD ~ NOT US thing. Meike wondered what Marek would think of all of this. He was pretty insistent that magic and blood were very much interlinked. The whole thing made her uncomfortable, but not enough to really challenge him about it too much. She was clever, hard-working and… well, quite non-confrontational. Not as passionate about things as her friend beside her. Suddenly, the crowd began to slow. Miha was pushing her way ahead to see what the disturbance was so Meike followed, keeping an eye out for photographers around them. When they got to the front of the group, the Krov girls were affronted with another group of people, similarly dressed and adorned with pickets and signs.

These guys, however, were protesting their protest.

“That troll-looking guy at the front seriously has a sign that says Magic is might? Is he for real?” Meike stared at her friend incredulously. “Magic is might,” she repeated in a deep voice, making a dumb troll face. “Purebloods are the best and there’s no incest at all.” She stomped a little to make her troll impersonation clear.

Meike hadn't expected things to go this way but it was bound to be an exciting afternoon, she thought, resigning herself with well-natured reluctance to the antics of her friend.

[end]

As the crowd moved forward and the two girls moved with them Mihaela started to fall right into place. She felt at home here in the chaos, it was her comfort zone. She smiled wildly, her teeth big and bright, and her eyes full of joy. "So what!" She shouted back as she laughed at the truth of it. Miha knew it was silly to be chanting the words knowing her own blood status but that wasn't really the point. After all she hadn't come up with the chant, she couldn't be blamed for its contents right?

Then the group grew louder and Mihaela became anxious to know what was going on up front. Pushing through the crowd with very little reservations she managed to get elbowed in the gut and shoulder check a man twice her size before she finally succeeded in navigating the two of them to the front line. And what they found surprised and invigorated her. She saw the group of pureblood supremacists standing before them, and she laughed out right at their stupid signs. She had no idea how they thought that they were on the winning side of this battle. Maybe Marek was right and the thicker the magic was in the blood the more powerful a person was but magic wasn't everything right? She laughed as Meike found her voice and agreed with her whole heartily.

"BLOOD TROLLS!" She screamed at them, sticking out her tongue and walking like a troll. She played off of Meike's lead in easily, always good at being back up but far from the leader. She moved slowly and far from gracefully, like her shoes were full of sand and dragged her arms toward the ground. "Magic is might this~" She turned around toward them and stuck her butt up in the air only to find herself being drowned out as one of the other protesters used the sonorous charm to make their voice louder. She watched him put his wand to his throat and then begin shouting his words even louder but Miha went back to impersonating a troll and began to pick her own nose. "Stupid trolls." She said, shaking her head and laughing with Meike as the protest continued.

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