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Rodney’s inbox held 5,706 unread emails. It wasn’t even a record.
Radek sighed, looked at his still unconscious boss and friend lying on the hospital bed in front of him, and got to work, decluttering as best he could. He deleted all the emails from botany and the rest of the ‘soft sciences’ without bothering to read them, having long ago set up a program that blind cc’d himself into all emails sent to Rodney from those departments. None of the staff had ever seemed to question why the emails they sent to Rodney were answered by Radek which was almost enough for Radek to agree with Rodney’s assessment of their intellect.
Rodney had been gone - missing - for sixteen days. The science department was used to doing without Rodney occasionally, during both scheduled and unscheduled absences.
Unscheduled absence. It was a fancy way to say missing. Lost, kidnapped, captive, injured, tortured.
Any secret desire Radek may have once harboured to be on a gate team had disappeared very soon after Rodney joined AR-1.
During the first of Rodney’s unscheduled absence - a startlingly short time into the expedition - Kavanagh had tried to stage a coup and insisted loudly that all emails that would normally go to Rodney be sent to him instead.
No one listened. They all continued to email Rodney, cc’ing Radek into only the really important stuff. In a strange way it had become their own little ritual. No matter how long Rodney was gone, the emails kept getting sent. Weekly status reports, requests for lab time, petty grievances and all.
It made it easier to believe that he would return. At least, that was why Radek allowed the practice to continue.
The first time Rodney had returned from one of these unscheduled absences, he had almost blown a gasket at the state of his inbox. Radek had not been alone in smiling through the ensuing rant but he agreed that it was unnecessary for Rodney to actually have to deal with all of their superstitious emails so the next time Rodney came back from an unscheduled absence Radek had cleared the inbox to a manageable level before Rodney was well enough to be granted system access.
He enjoyed the process, as monotonous and time consuming as it was. Maybe that was just because it meant that Rodney wasn’t dead.
Lorne, he knew, had his own rituals for when Colonel Sheppard was in the same sort of situation.
More often than not, both Sheppard and McKay were gone - missing, lost, kidnapped, captive, injured, tortured, whatever - at the same time. Despite the extra work that sort of situation created for everyone on Atlantis, Radek preferred it that way.
At least when they were both gone, he didn’t have to deal with Sheppard’s emails.
Sheppard had his own little rituals for dealing with Rodney’s absence; little rituals that involved emailing Rodney every day, telling him just how pissed he was going to be when they found Rodney and brought him back. Emails - dozens of them - that promised hours and hours of training in the gym, that spoke of forcing Rodney to join John and Ronon on their morning runs. Emails that begged Rodney to be ok, first for Atlantis’ sake and then, eventually, when the absence lasted long enough, for John’s own sake.
The strength of John’s feelings for Rodney had brought tears to Radek’s eyes more than once. John knew that he read them - Radek had told John about his monitoring the very first time he had accidentally read one of John’s pleas for Rodney to be ok. John had paled and clenched his jaw so tight that Radek feared it might break.
He hadn’t stopped though. The very next day another email had appeared with the subject line: “This helps. I don’t know why but it does. Read them or don’t, just...do what you have to.”
Radek did what he had to. He kept John’s secret and, that first time when Rodney re-appeared - dirty and tired but surprisingly whole - he did John’s bidding and deleted them all, wiping them from Rodney’s emails without leaving any trace behind.
He always deleted the emails in the end. He always hated himself afterwards.
5,706 unread emails and sixteen from John. One for every day Rodney had been missing.
Radek’s eyes hovered over the latest one, his breath drawing in as he read the words that John would never say out loud.
I love you. Please come back to me.
Radek looked at his friend again, looked at John’s sleeping form hunched over the other chair, his head pillowed on the mattress and...he couldn’t do it anymore. He took his finger off the delete button.
Maybe it was time to force some hands.
But first, he had another 5,000 emails to go through.