Of Blue Envelopes | ON HOLD

I: Of Letters and Promises

A set of headphones covering her ears, Gabrielle tapped her pencil to the beat of a song, the soft eraser on the end rapping on the smooth surface of her desk. Lying on the same table was her notebook, open to a new page and terrifyingly blank.

All of the clutter that had populated the desk had been relocated to the floor, and the new emptiness of surface gave Gabby even less inspiration to write, if anything. But had the stacks of paper been on her desk, they would have distracted her and drawn her attention to other objects, so she had deemed it for the best that they were tucked away from sight.

Creative writing assignments were never easy to do. She constantly ended up scurrying around the fringes of the guidlines and yet still trying to make the piece sound like it was actually written by her. Somehow, she always pulled through in the end, but as always, she was astonishingly lacking in the department of ideas.

Listening to music didn't seem to help the ever-elusive ideas come along, but it did remove some of the pressure she was feeling by the steadily approaching exams. Days ticked on at the same pace they always did, but they seemed to be moving much faster when something she dreaded was coming up.

She stopped tapping her pencil on the desk for a few moments, letting herself get swept away by the rhythms and harmonies of the song. Her thoughts drifted to faraway places, and the excitement of  summer vacation. It was all so close now, and yet far too out of reach.

Lost in her daydreams, a tap on her shoulder startled Gabby all the way off her chair and onto the floor. The headphones, being pulled away with her, were yanked out of their port in her laptop, and immediately music began to blare from its speakers.

Fumbling with the technology for a few moments, she managed to silence the loud singing emerging from her computer before turning to her laughing roommate.

"You know, it's really a wonder you get anything done Gabs," Sara commented, sounding thoroughly amused. She stood still, not moving an inch to help her friend, seeming to find delight in Gabby's ineptitude.

The hilarity of the situation was entirely lost on Gabby, who glared as she sat herself down in her chair once more. "You wanted to say something?" she grumbled, annoyed at her own clumsiness.

Sara gave a mildly disinterested shrug, dropping a blue envelope in front of Gabrielle before retreating to her own desk. "It's adressed to you, but it's pretty weird," she replied apathetically, sounding bored now that there was no entertainment to be had from her roommate's demise.

The writer silently observed the envelope for a moment and felt compelled to agree with her roommate. The back of it was covered in stamps, from all over the world. And not just that either. "The stamps don't make any sense," she commented out loud. Her eyes widened at the sight of a particular one from Venezuela, from the year 1870.

Her eyes shifted to her roommate, who already seemed to have deemed the issue to be irrelevant and sunk down into her own spinny chair. Sara had started running through her study notes for one of her many courses, there was no reaching her anymore. Gabby was left on her own to ponder the issue.

Turning away from Sara, her eyes flicked back over to the mysterious envelope, her curiosity incresing with every new detail she took in.

On one side, it was covered by an assortment of stamps from all around the globe, from a mess of different dates. There weren't many conclusions to be drawn from it other than the fact that the sender could likely be a collector of things from the past.

Still, that gave no hints as to why this person would have sent their letter to her. And they had clearly meant to have it delivered to her - Her name and address were printed neatly in the middle of the colourful stamps.

The fact that they knew her address already made the situation considerably suspicious, as her primary mailing adress remained as her parent's home. She'd had many problems throughout the year with her mail being misdirected, but the sender of this letter seemed to know exactly where she'd be.

She flipped it around to view the front, but there wasn't much to observe on that side, Unlike the back, the only decoration on the front of the envelope was a small number 4, printed on the bottom of the flap.

Satisfied that she'd gained all the knowledge she could from the outside, she grabbed for a pen, hurriedly tearing the envelope open to examine the contents, her curiosity unable to hold out any longer.

But the inside of the envelope was rather disappointing, compared to the peculiar covering. There were three lines of text only. The first with 3 sets of numbers, separated by slashes. The second with two sets of numbers, separated by a colon and followed by two letters. The third with several numbers and degree symbols.

Gabrielle determined that they were a date, a time and coordinates, accordingly. A few searches on Google Maps revealed that the coordinates matched up to Lake Silencio in Utah. But still, none of the information made any sense. The letter wasn't signed off, let alone with any name, and there was no return address for the letter.

The date, time and coordinates suggested a meeting, but kept the person suggesting it tucked neatly behind a cloak of mystery.

It worked to their advantage though, as she found herself wanting to go, now more than ever. The meeting held the promise of both answers and adventure. The date, thankfully, corresponded with the weekend, so if she timed her trip well, she could easily make it back in time for next week's classes.

Her eyes shifted over to the invitation pinned to a cork board abover her desk, and held her gaze there for a few moments, contempaling both the envelope in blue and the envelope in white. She glanced back down to the empty notebook, continuing to ponder for a few moments before calling out to her roommate. "Could I borrow your car for the weekend?"

When Sara grumbled an 'okay', she gingerly put down the letter, and commenced jotting down words onto her notepad. Editing could always turn the story into something proper, she decided, there was something much more important she had to get to.

Unfortunately, time seemed to have a funny way of slowing down whenever something she was looking forward to was coming up soon.

a/n: *screams into a pillow* I have finished it! Finally! 3 months of waiting to write and 2 weeks of planning. It is done! Although, it's quite short for something I've budgeted quite a bit of time to working on... Oh well, worry not readers. An entire book awaits. If you didn't get it from the description (who knows, maybe you skipped it), the author's note (to be fair, you could have skipped that too) or one of the many references (hey, maybe you didn't see that episode yet) this is a Doctor Who fan fiction.

And hopefully, it will be completed one day, and I will shove it into all my friend's faces because completing a story is something I have rarely ever managed to accomplish (and by rarely ever, I mean really-super-incredibly-rarely ever). So... *breathes heavily* we have begun.

I do realize I have basically revealed no information in this prologue other than the facts that our lovely heroine is named Gabrielle (I sincerely apologize for the vague High School Musical origins), she is a writer (and in college for it) and is a teeny bit clumsy (but just a teeny bit). Her relationship with the Doctor... WELL. You'll just have to see. *nudge nudge (discreet wink)*

→ Picture to the side is Gabby (well, Skyler Samuels, but I've cast her as Gabrielle)