The Physicist Bride

[rachael-recs.livejournal.com]

My Sheppard/McKay rec50 table.

Claim: Stargate Atlantis: John Sheppard/Rodney McKay
Title: The Physicist Bride
Author: Zulu (queenzulu)
Characters:
Prompt: 18 - Light
Rating: (im)Mature
Length: Long
Brief summary: A reworking of The Princess Bride, this story captures not only the style of the original story, but also the essence of the Atlantis characters as well. The translation of the characters into their various story-dictated roles is fabulous, and the dialog is brilliantly transposed as well. It's a total romp.


When Rodney McKay was born, the smartest person in the world was Dr. Albert Einstein, but he'd been riding the coattails of a single theorem for more than sixty years by then and was clearly over-hyped. By the time he was four, Rodney McKay could have (and did) explain to strangers on the street why E = mc-squared just wasn't the achievement everyone thought it to be. When Rodney McKay was an undergraduate, the smartest person in the world was Dr. Stephen Hawking, more by popular acclaim and high book sales than anything else. Rodney had been systematically demolishing all his theories for years, even before he knew about the Stargate and could do his demolishing with experiential data to back him up. When Rodney McKay was in Atlantis, the smartest person in the galaxy was, well, Rodney McKay, and he didn't let anyone forget it, not even the three biochemists who got amnesia from an Ancient PET scan device the first week they were there and had to be told who they were all over again every morning.

The two things that Rodney McKay loved to do more than anything else were studying Ancient technology and taunting the flyboy. Ever since he'd had the gene therapy, the Ancient technology usually did what he told it, which was all he asked for. The flyboy did what he told him too. Rodney gave him clearly detailed and comprehensive instructions, like "Touch this. Initialize it. Oh my God, not that, are you an intellectual child? Do you really want us to explode in a dozen equally unpleasant ways at the same time? The other thing, this, this, come on."

"Whatever you say, Rodney."

That was all he ever replied. "Sit in the control chair." "Whatever you say, Rodney." "Think about where we are in the solar system." "Whatever you say, Rodney." "Oh, shit, shoot at them! Blow them up! Come on, you're military, you're supposed to like taking bullets for me, a Wraith stunner isn't half so baaaaauuuuurgggh." "Whatever you say, Rodney."

Now Rodney was the smartest person in the whole galaxy--on a good day, it was more like two--but he had no idea that when the flyboy said, "Whatever you say, Rodney," what he really meant was, "I love you."


Link to the story: The Physicist Bride