Title: Light Reading

Prompts: 'chapter', provided by chasingkerouac

Spoilers: Set mid-season two, spoilers for Hot Zone, sort of -- and 'War and Peace', if you want to get technical.

Summary: "Many historians say that the French did not win the battle of Borodino because Napoleon had a cold, and that if he had not had a cold the orders he gave before and during the battle would have been still more full of genius and Russia would have been lost and the face of the world have been changed."

~War and Peace, Leo Tolstoy


Nearly eighteen months on Atlantis, and John was only on chapter twenty-eight, book ten.

Granted, there were seventeen books and a whole lot more chapters, but still -- it was the principle of the thing. One of these days McKay was going to start ribbing him with not-so-veiled hints about what happened in chapter whatever of book fifteen. Although in all fairness, John could probably lob a few little barbs about being too busy saving Rodney's ass from certain death on multiple occasions to really put in the extra hours of reading War and Peace.

Besides, McKay was a physicist, not a military historian or a connoisseur of Russian literature, so he probably wouldn't understand the appeal of Tolstoy. He certainly hadn't caught the amused irony in John's voice when he'd calmly informed McKay that Atlantis wouldn't sink back into the ocean if Rodney caught a cold.

"Colonel, there are probably millions of unfamiliar bacteria loose in this city, just waiting to lock on to a susceptible immune system like mine -- or are you forgetting that whole debacle with the nanovirus? We'll see who's laughing when an Ancient 'cold' comes along and decimates our population, and cross your fingers we never run across the plague that killed so many of them," McKay rattled off, not even pausing for breath.

John replied with a cynical, "Sure thing, Rodney," and walked out of the lab, smirking to himself at the mental image of Rodney McKay decked out like Napoleon.

"By the way, Colonel," McKay called, pausing long enough to give John's back a smug look. "Prince Andrew dies, you know."

Damn the man.