A/N: One f-ing long chapter means the next one is ridiculously short...? ô.ò Maybe...
I do not own or profit from any of what Kazue Kato has created.
Hell.
He was in hell, and hell was full of shrill clay flutes that drove nails into his head and grated them down his skull.
"Turn that off…!" Shiro croaked into the pillow, cold and overheated and-
"And miss the new episode of Haha o Tazunete Sanzen Ri?"
"I don't care about your anime." Not when it aired bloody seven thirty in the morning. "I'm trying to sleep."
"And waste a lovely day like this? Have you seen how soft and fluffy the clouds are in that clear blue sky?"
At the command of a snap, every window blind flew up and spewed Summer's Brightest Day In Ten Years over Shiro's face.
"Ngah! Oh, god, fuck…!" He pulled the silk sheets up to shield his head, and wished he could detach it from the rest of his body until the headache passed. "You're a royal jerk, you know that?" he muttered at the muted snickering that seeped through the fabric.
"Hmm~ you might have insinuated something to that effect a few times."
Shiro's misery would not entertain Mephisto with any snappy retort to that chirping cheerful comme-
His sluggish cognitive faculties did their best to interpret what was wrong in that picture, but protested loudly at the overtime work. It was no surprise that Mephisto found his suffering amusing: what was surprising (not to mention irritating) was that he didn't seem to be suffering.
"You were so plastered you could barely even stand." Shiro crawled around to face the nest of cushions, lifted his sheets enough to peek out and squinted warningly at Mephisto from his not-quite-light-proof shelter. A Grumpy Tortoise of Doom. "If you're about to tell me you can poof away hangovers…"
"No such thing, little lion", Mephisto laughed, waving a hand dismissively at the hovering threat. "Fast metabolism, fast hydrolysis of alcohol: ergo, I don't get hangovers." To rub that in properly, Mephisto smugged him with a pleasant wink over his shoulder. "Ever."
"…I hate you so much right now", Shiro grumbled, and buried himself in the bliss darkness under the sheet.
"Such a lovely day~"
"Go to hell."
A/N:
Haha o Tazunete Sanzen Ri got the English title 3000 Leauges in Search of Mother and is about Marco, a boy living 19th century Genoa, Italy. His dad runs a hospital but focuses on treating the poor, so his family is low on money. His mother travels to Argentina to earn an extra living as a maid, but after a while she falls ill and letters cease coming to Italy. The rest of the plot is pretty much explained by the title.
Everything you never needed to know about alcohol metabolism!
Though "everything" is an exaggeration. But a little. Enough to find it logical that Mephisto is fine while Shiro is not.
To start with the basics, the body runs on energy, and everything we eat/drink is broken down to generate that energy. Ethanol, which is the booze part of booze, is essentially a carbohydrate. Ethanol gets taken apart by the body cells until it becomes acetate, after which it is converted to energy like all other carbohydrates we eat. Between ethanol and acetate, the booze briefly exists in the shape of a molecule called acetaldehyde, which is the molecule Shiro should be hurling his curses at instead of Mephisto. Acetaldehyde is what makes you feel like shit when you've drunk.
So, a hangover happens when your cells don't convert acetaldehyde to acetate fast enough: you get acetaldehyde building up and poisoning you. I'm just hypothesising this, but to me Mephisto's metabolism seems very effective, considering how much carbohydrates he stuffs himself with while still remaining thin as a stick. So he probably has a very energy demanding body and some very efficient enzymes to work his metabolism. And if he burns through regular carbohydrates that fast, he might burn through alcohol just as fast? (I am hypothesising things wildly here~)
The enzyme of interest here is acetaldehyde dehydrogenase: it's what turns the toxic acetaldehyde into useful acetate. It's what saves you from hangovers. And did you know? In China and Japan, there is a wide-spread genetic mutation that inhibits the function of this particular enzyme. In other words, Shiro is likely not very good at metabolising alcohol. =P (I'm surprised he didn't feel the effects earlier, but then again there are endless variations to this mutation...)