Postcodes

Summary: Captain Jack Harkness likes to keep in touch the old-fashioned way (and may be subsidizing the post office in the process).

Disclaimer: I don't own Torchwood; I'm just borrowing them for non-profit fun.

It was a peaceful day in the Torchwood Hub. No spaceships crash-landing; no Weevil uprisings; no reports of anyone being eaten, possessed, murdered under strange circumstances, or anything else that required Torchwood's immediate attention.

Tosh was happily engrossed in a tricky translation; after a first crude translation attempt when it dropped through the Rift, they'd concluded that it was alien literature of some sort, or a log book, or at least something similarly non-threatening, an assessment that had both piqued Tosh's interest and dropped the project far down the list of priorities. Owen appeared to be setting up a makeshift distillery in the lab, most likely experimenting with one of the plants in an attempt to recreate the alien liquor that Jack had described a few weeks earlier. Jack was doing paperwork at his desk, and Ianto meandered back and forth between the tourist shop, the coffee machine, and...well, whatever else Ianto occupied himself with—Gwen wasn't entirely sure what that entailed, only that it kept the Hub running smoothly.

Gwen herself was finishing up a letter to the families affected by the latest case. Five people had died and two ended up in the hospital before Torchwood subdued the alien responsible, and despite the judicious application of Retcon, the families were still pressing the police for answers—leading Andy to pressure Gwen in turn, on behalf of the families and his own curiosity. After several days of badgering, Gwen had finally talked Jack into approving an "official" (and almost entirely false) explanation and condolence letter for the families.

As the printer whirred to life, Gwen started affixing address labels and postage to envelopes. Twelve copies of the letter to go directly to involved civilians, one copy for Andy so he'd know the cover story (Not that that'll stop him asking what really happened, Gwen thought), and one copy for Jack's final approval. She picked up the stack of stuffed envelopes and headed for Jack's office.

Ianto looked up as she walked by. "Need me to post those?" he asked, nodding to the envelopes.

"Not quite yet. Jack wants to read the letter before it gets sent out."

"On your way there now?" he said, inclining his head towards Jack's office. Gwen nodded. "Do me a favor and ask him if he's got anything for the post, so I can deal with the whole lot at the same time. I think that's what he's been working on."

Jack looked up as Gwen walked in; his desk was covered in papers: some typed, most handwritten. "Here's the letter for the families and the police," she said, holding it out. Jack quickly moved several piles of paper out of the way to clear some space and skimmed through the letter.

His eyebrows rose slightly as he read. "Hm...Nice work. That sounds more plausible than I thought it would." He finished reading, considered for a moment, then nodded decisively. "Send it." As he looked back to Gwen, he noticed the stack of stuffed envelopes she was holding. He leaned back in his chair with a wry smile, lacing his fingers together behind his head. "Well, you were confident. What were you going to do if I wanted to change it?"

"They're not sealed yet. But why would I expect you change it when it's already perfect?" she teased. "Oh...Ianto wants to know if you've got anything for the post so he can send out the whole lot together."

Jack blinked and straightened up again, turning his attention to the mess of papers. "Uh...yes, I do...Just a minute." He started quickly riffling through the piles of paper, pulling out a fairly large stack of hand-addressed envelopes. He scooped up the papers he'd been working on when she arrived—three pages of simple cream-colored stationery covered in Jack's handwriting, clearly a letter. He quickly scribbled down one more line of text and a signature before stuffing the pages into an already addressed envelope and adding it to the stack. Gwen leaned against the wall, watching with interest. Nothing about these papers looked like Torchwood business; they all looked like personal correspondence. Now that she was paying attention, she realized that the other papers littering his desk seemed to be letters as well—letters in many different handwritings, on different types of stationery, some even appeared to be in different languages (one looked like it was in one of the alien languages she'd seen on Tosh's computer screen)—all addressed to Jack. Two birthday cards (one in English, and the other apparently in French) were the next items to be quickly checked over, signed, and stuffed in envelopes. Jack looked over the desk one last time as he picked up the resulting stack of letters, "That should be it." He paused, looking at the size of his pile and then at Gwen's own stack, then stood up. "I'll walk down with you."

Gwen couldn't hold back her curiousity any longer as they walked towards Ianto's desk. "Is that all just personal letters? I don't think I've sent out that many letters in my life, much less in one day!"

Jack hesitated and then sighed, apparently resigned to the fact that he wasn't going to weasel out of this discussion easily, "Well, I've lived long enough to collect a lot of acquaintances who are more used to letter-writing—," he paused, expression pained, before adding, "like Estelle...and I've been too busy to write recently, so I had some catching up to do. It's a good way to keep in touch, especially without them noticing my lack of aging."

By this time they'd reached Ianto's desk. He took the stacks of letters with a smile: "That's everything then? Excellent. I'll get them right out." As Ianto walked away, they heard a excited exclamation from Tosh.

"I've got it. I think I've really got it!" She pivoted in her chair to wave them over frantically.

"What is it then?" asked Gwen, as she and Jack came to peer at the monitor.

"It's not a story or a log book after all—well...it is sort of a story, just not like alien literature, as we thought before. It's a letter! Someone writing home to his family. See, he's telling them about a mining project he's working on. And here he's telling his kids that he misses them, and..." Gwen leaned against Tosh's desk, listening to her ramble excitedly about the details of the anonymous alien miner and his family. Aliens sending letters, she mused, who would have thought of that? Beings with the technology for interstellar travel, and they're still writing letters. Maybe that letter on Jack's desk really was in an alien language—I wonder how he posts that?

Once Tosh was congratulated on a job well done and the excitement died down, everyone headed back to their various tasks.

Back at his desk, Jack cleared his letters away, making a note of the few he still needed to respond to. He picked up his address book, an odd, overstuffed book that was cross-referenced by dates, as well as names—after all, it wouldn't do to send get his timelines mixed up and send someone a letter before he'd met them. Actually, "address book" might not even be the right term for the notebook—too many of the names didn't have any contact information at all. Jack liked staying in touch with old friends and past lovers, but sometimes it didn't work out. Sometimes he hadn't gotten around to asking for an address before they parted, or they hadn't had one to give him—wanderers, like Jack himself had been for so long; others had moved on, and he'd lost track of where they were now. A few entries had just a general location noted down in the hope that he'd might one day be able to track down a more exact address.

As he slipped the overstuffed book back into the drawer, a long-ago memory sprang to mind: a friend teasing him about how many names it contained, joking that Jack would sleep with "anything with a pulse"—only to be corrected by another friend "No, no! He files them in an address book! It's anything with a postcode!"

Author's note: This fic was inspired by seeing some clips where John Barrowman said that Jack would sleep with "anything with a postcode." That got me wondering why a postcode would be the deciding factor, and I decided that the most obvious conclusion was that Jack liked to keep in touch with them, so he needs contact information. I later remembered Jack's comment in the Doctor Who episode "The Doctor Dances": "The last time I was sentenced to death...I woke up in bed with both of my executioners. Lovely couple, they stayed in touch! Can't say that about most executioners," which seems to support the idea that Jack keeps up a correspondence with people from his past.

When I started writing, I knew it was set within the first two seasons, but didn't have a more specific time frame in mind. Then I realized that having met Estelle in "Small Worlds" would help Gwen realize why Jack would have friends from eras when letter-writing was more common. Later still, I realized that with this story theme, Tosh's translation project had to be the alien letter she mentions in "Greeks Bearing Gifts". Therefore, this fic is set between those two episodes.

This is my first time posting a story; constructive criticism (whether on writing style or feedback on whether the Torchwood crew seems in character) would be appreciated!