A/N: This is a bit odd for me. I haven't written in first person in years, and Remus gets a little too lovey-dovey in this. I wanted to make is longer, a series of letters, but I don't have the time right now so it must stand alone! Written for OnTheSideOfTheAngel's My Future Self Competition.

Prompt: 13. Sing

Pairing: Remus Lupin/Sirius Black

1976

Dear Future Me,

So you're older and wiser and I feel like a lost little boy. I need to write to someone for advice, or maybe just to vent, but there's no one I deem trustworthy enough for this. You know though. Of course you know.

You know that I'm trying so hard to just work, to just get through school with the best marks I can. But, it's not working, Future Me, it's not working because I'm getting too bloody distracted. I'm filling the margins with doodles and haikus that have his name hidden in so many different places, if only you look hard enough.

He is in everything I do.

Sirius...

Sirius Sirius Sirius.

He makes me feel like writing broken poetry, or singing a song with lyrics that my lips don't yet know, the lyrics of how he tastes in the night and how he sounds when he promises forever.

Do you have him, Future Me? If you do, please let me know. And you don't, please tell me you do so that I can keep hoping.

Because he's driven me mad, absolutely mad, and the words are falling from my quill faster than anything's ever fallen from my lips because writing is easier, right?

So I'm going to tell you how I feel and hopefully you'll remember and smile, or remember and sigh, or, better yet, you'll call him over and wave this yellowed paper in his face and let him read a love letter from your sixteen year old self and then you will remember and kiss him.

So. Here it is:

I think I'm the only one who lets him play them like a broken violin, and I am certainly the only one who lets him sing them like a ballad that never was quite finished.

I am not a music lover.

But I am falling out of staves and hanging from twisted treble clefs that somehow swing from his ear like beautiful, musical earrings and I would promise him a thousand, no, a million poems if he said I love you the way he says hello.

But he doesn't, and so I stand up straight and I spit notes like I am his own personal orchestra and I wrote this song for him (and only him) when he wasn't even listening, when he wouldn't sing along and so I played it to his back and hoped his smile would boomerang back and hit me right in the bow.

And maybe I'm not the only one who spills music onto his sheets or the only one who fills his ears with well-meaning nonsense, but I am the only one who writes him rambling poetry and imagines how he'd cringe away at all the cheesy lines because I love you has never been his style.

(But I write them anyway because at least then I can say I'm the only one who does and, one day, when I force an I love you from between his shaking lips, I will sing him a poem and pretend it's the violin solo he asked for back when his touches were chaste and his hands were cold.

And none of it will matter because I'll have already gotten those three little words and tucked them into my teeth so I could say them back with ease.

Because I love him and I love him and I love him and I'll sing for him even though I'm off-key and off track and I never really was one for music anyway.)

Promise me, Future Me, that you have bottled up this feeling, this euphoria, for the long and lonely nights that keep you howling.

Promise me that his love has kept you sane.

Sincerely,

Remus