Jacob released a deep sigh as he stared at the fireplace, and his lips pressed together in a thin line. This was it, he only had one plan to rescue Harry and if he messed it up he might not get a chance to see his brother again until Hogwarts.

"No, no I can't think like that" Jacob thought angrily "I'm going to save Harry from those bastards and he's going to be ok, and we'll start fixing everything together."

Some of Jacob's worry and frustration must have leaked from onto his face, because he soon felt a squeeze of the hand on his shoulder and he looked up to see Sirius staring down at him.

"You ok there, Pup? You look like you want to punch the fireplace, and I'd rather not have to replace it afterwards." Sirius jokes, but his eyes bely his worry.

Jacob snorted despite himself, and shook his head.

"I'm fine"

"You sure, kiddo?" Sirius tried again "Because if you don't want to do this I'm sure Remus would-"

"I need to do this, Uncle Sirius." Jacob said quickly, a tinge of his impatience leaking out into his voice.

"I-" he frowned and placed his tiny hand on top of Sirius' much larger one "Sorry, Padfoot. I didn't mean to snap, I just need to talk to Remus. Like, really, really bad."

Sirius raised both hands in surrender.

"Say no more pup" he managed with a forced chuckle "Just, be careful, ok? Remus hasn't really been on good terms with your Dad or me in years, and while I don't think he'd hurt you, he might say some hurtful things."

"As well he bloody should" Jacob thought, but he managed to fake a semi-convincing meek nod.

"I'll be careful"

Sirius nodded.

"Right, well, it's time now pup. Let's get you gone to the Big Bad Wolf." Sirius grabbed some flu powder from the mason jar that rested on his flat's shelf, and tossed a handful into the fire.

"Wolf's Cabin!"

As Sirius spoke a green fire erupted inside the crackling orange and quickly spread from the center out, ebbing the noise of the fire until it was eerily silent and burned a vivid lime-green.

"Well, best be on your way Pup."

Jacob nodded, and stepped into the green flame, feeling it wrap around his entire body slowly and harmlessly, like a warm, squishy bed surrounding him. Then all to soon the soft green flames tugged down hard, and Jacob disappeared through the flu network and was whisked away to his declared destination.

Jacob felt the familiar tug upwards a moment after stepping into the flu, and stepped forward right as he felt the grip on his body slacken. The Potter heir emerged smoothly from the flu with more grace than most children possessed, which made sense as Jacob Potter was truly no child.

"Jacob, you're exactly on time." Remus said in clear surprise, but still politely guided him towards a small table near the fireplace with a teapot and two cups already waiting.

"Your letter said exactly 1 in the afternoon. It's one, so here I am." Jacob said simply, already losing the little patience he had for pretending to be the eight year old kid he was supposed to be.

Remus gave him a slightly surprised look, but nodded and waited for Jacob to sit down before taking a seat himself.

"Tea?" He asked, holding the still steaming pot over the faux-child's cup.

"Yes, please." Jacob said simply, barely keeping a calm demeanor at having to wait even another second to get to business.

Every moment he wasted convincing Sirius to let him come here or being a polite little chap to Remus was another moment Harry spent in that house of nightmares in sweet Little Whinging.

Sensing Jacob's obvious agitation, Remus broke the sudden pungent silence awkwardly.

"Err… Jacob. Not that I'm not happy to see you, I so rarely get visitors out here, but…Why were you so insistent on coming here? Sirius made it seem li-"

"Harry's in danger!"

Jacob's patience snapped before Remus could finish his polite question, words angrily ripped from his mouth in a shout.

Silence reigned for a moment as Remus's mouth hung open in mid sentence, now completely stunned by the words Jacob had just so callously spoken.

"Ex-Excuse me?" He spluttered helplessly "Jacob what are you-How do you even-Did James…?"

` Jacob actually sneered at that, unable to contain his emotions or gut reactions anymore after almost an entire week of having to tamper them down while he waited to see Remus.

"And ruin all his hard work lying about it all these years? No, Dad hasn't told me jack, Uncle Moony."

Remus was absolutely out of his depth here, unable to truly understand exactly what Jacob was saying. It was so out of character for the boy, but then again, Remus barely ever saw him. And much could change over the course of a few years….

"Jacob, hold on a moment here! What on earth is going on?"

"There's no time for stupid explanations or arguments, Remus!" Jacob protested angrily, jumping from his chair and grabbing Remus's sleeve and tugging hard "I just told you, Harry is in danger! He's in more and more pain every damn second we wait! So get off your arse!"

"Wait, wait. Backup a moment, Jacob." Remus said, putting up both hands "First off, I don't know where you heard all of this language, but it's not appropriate for a youngman of your age. Second, start from the beginning. How do you know about Harry, if your dad didn't tell you? And why is he in danger?"

"Remus!" Jacob whined angrily "I just said there wasn't time!"

"And I'm not going anywhere or doing anything until you tell me how you know about your brother, who your father unjustly, but quite successfully hid the existence of, and why on earth you're convinced he's in imminent danger."

Jacob took a deep breath, and then another. Steadying himself and slowing his panic and rage so he could actually answer the poor werewolf's reasonable questions.

"Ok, Ok" Jacob said, pacing quickly in his tiny eight year old body in a way that was undeniably adorable, but also to serius for Remus to laugh at.

"Ok, so about a week ago I started having nightmares. Horrible, awful nightmares. Nightmares where I wasn't me. But I looked like me whenever I walked past a mirror or looked in a puddle. Except I didn't look exactly like me, I was always really thin, with greasy unwashed hair. And I had this scar on my forehead shaped like a lightning bolt, and-and I always felt bruised and hungry. Really, really hungry.

And there were horrible awful people who would hit me and yell at me and call me a Freak. "

"Ok…?"

"At first, at first I thought they're just dreams, right? But I feel inside them, Remus, and I see whole memories of another life. And-and I remember everything! Everything! And it all felt so, so real. So, I went into the Family Library when Dad was at work, and started reading to see if there was anything wrong with me. And at first I couldn't find anything and I started to think I was fine. But then I accidentally knocked some kind of family tracking book or something off the shelf."

"Genealogy" Remus supplied robotically, his voice and face now having gone grim and quiet.

"Right, that!" Jacob said with a snap of his fingers "Anyways I knock that off the shelf, and it opens up to our family tree. Something I only at that moment realize I've never seen before. So I took a look, because I'm curious. And do you know what I see? I see little portraits spelled to reflect the current look of the person they're drawn from. And oh look, guess whose branch is connected next to mine: the same little boy I see in my dreams! You know, the one whose being hurt and yelled at and starved and-and he has family! He's got a brother! A Dad! He could be full and happy, but instead he's in constant danger! Why? Why is Harry not safe?

That's what I asked and asked myself. And then I wondered why we didn't have any family trees out. So I asked Dad that, and he said all the magic ones were destroyed. And I know that that's a lie! So I asked Uncle Sirius and he told me the same lie! So now I'm asking you, Uncle Remus, why is Harry gone, and why is he in danger?"

Remus just sat in his chair for a moment, still stunned from the young boy's tirade. Truly he shouldn't have expected anything less from Jacob, he had always been hyper and overactive and when pushed like this it made sense that he might devolve into word vomit. Finally Remus managed to collect himself enough to actually articulate a response.

"There's, ok. There is a lot to unpack in that monster of a question. And I don't-Kiddo I just don't have all of the answers." Remus took a steadying breath and silently cursed James for the choices that left Remus having to explain his bad decisions.

"Jacob" He began carefully "You know that when you were little He-Who-Must-Not-Be-Named came after you and your parents, right? And your Mum did something that we still don't fully understand that let you survive the Killing Curse"

Jacob nodded so hard his head was almost a blur, clearly impatient for Remus to get to the point.

"Ok, well as you can probably guess now, you weren't alone in the house that night when he came. Harry was in the crib with you when Lily…made her sacrifice. We think he was there to kill both of you that night, but he only ever got to attack one of you. He cast that thrice dam-" Remus caught himself before the swear word slipped from his lips , and amended his statement "He cast the Killing Curse on you, and you know the rest. There was bright lights, an explosion, and You-Know-Who was destroyed, leaving you without even a mark beyond the faint residual magic of the killing curse."

Remus paused and licked his lips, before draining all the tea in his cup in one quick pull and continuing his explanation.

"Harry though, he wasn't so lucky. He got hurt by whatever happened that night, Jacob. He got that strange scar on his forehead that you saw, and it just reeked of Dark Magic that not even Dumbledore could identify. What's worse, his magical core had gone from being small and healthy to being completely and totally hollow. Not gone mind you, or even truly unstable just…empty. None of the healers your Dad took him to had any idea what was going on.

What they did know though was that Harry's core was desperately trying to fill itself, and it began to siphon off magic from every single source available to it to try and do so. At first it was just sucking the enchantments off of your toys, or a tiny jolt of lost magic here and there from one of us. But it got worse with every passing day, to the point where Harry was unintentionally knocking you out by sucking your magic straight out of your body. At its worst, it drained your Father, Sirius, and myself in the same night, and managed to pull magic out of Dumbledore before he managed to cut Harry off and contain it for a brief time. If he hadn't…. Well death is the best possible out come for having your magic completely sucked out of you."

Jacob stood there, eager impatience gone as he listened intently. He had never heard this before. How had he never heard this before? He knew Harry had been siphoning his magic, sure, but he had always assumed it was their twin bond. A bond whose growth rapidly slowed when twins were removed from close proximity for extended periods of time during their magical growth. He never knew it had been this bad. No one had ever told him it had been this bad, not his father, not Sirius, certainly not Remus. Although Remus and Sirius were both dead long before he would have willingly asked them these questions in his time.

Remus continued in spite of Jacobs utter shock, seemingly unable to stop now that he had opened the floodgates of information.

"As you can imagine, it was a really bad time for all of us. Your father had just lost your mum, and now he was devoting everything he had into trying to fix Harry while also keeping you safe from Harry. Sirius and I helped where we could, but while he could play with and hold his godson to comfort him, all I could do with mine was watch from the otherside of specially charmed glass.

Even Dumbeldore ran himself ragged trying to find a solution, anything that might be able to help Harry. In the end the one that he found wasn't something I felt we could ever agree too, but Sirius and James were at their wits end, and they disagreed."

"They sent Harry away to keep me safe?" Jacob asked in a quiet voice that tore Remus's heart in two.

"They did." he nodded grimly "Dumbledore could find no cure or indeed even an identity for whatever plagued Harry, but he'd come up with a kind of solution by looking at medical procedures for infectious diseases: quarantine. Your brother had become some kind of magical parasite, with his body devouring any magic it could get its hands on. He wagered that if Harry was completely isolated from all magic, that he would be safe. He didn't think Harry would ever recover from his affliction, but if he was placed in a home without magic, with a muggle family, completely surrounded by a non-magical community, he would cease to be a threat to those around him.

So, that's what they did. Against my every caution and argument that we couldn't just leave Harry behind, James agreed to leave Harry with Lily's older sister, your Aunt Petunia. Since she also had a child around your age and he wanted to leave Harry with family. I argued against it every moment that I could, I swear I was the only one in that moment who wanted to remember how much Lily always complained about her. How much Petunia had hated her, hated magic. James was willing to ignore years of the woman completely ignoring her own sister just because Lily was dead and he had given up on finding a cure."

"So, my Aunt hates mum and hates magic?"

Remus nodded grimly

"Or at least she seemed to last I saw her, though it's been almost ten years since then."

Jacob's face twisted into a frown.

"But she obviously hasn't! My dreams show Harry being yelled at by a big man and locked in a dark place by a mean woman and hit by a fat boy. You said she hates Mum and Magic. And Harry is Mum's kid and you said he still had a core, it just wasn't normal! So if my dreams showed me Harry in pain and scared…"

The tea cups and pot shattered onto the floor as Remus leaped out of his seat, wand shooting into his hand as his eye's blew wide.

"Dear Merlin" he whispered "You were right when you came through the flu, if your dreams are real, then Harry needs us now."

A/n

Well, so comes and goes another chapter! Thank you to everyone whose decided to give this work a read, and a special thanks to everyone whose left a comment! They really help motivate me to write on this thing.

Now, on to story points. I'm really trying hard with this fic to create an actually working version of classic Wrong Boy Who Lived tropes without requiring a major suspension of disbelief. For instance in this chapter I really wanted to give James and the others a real reason to have given up harry beyond just "Lol, he's a squib.". I'm not sure if I pulled it off, but that's my goal. And who knows, maybe Harry's mysterious illness might factor into the story later on?(Hint hint, nudge nudge)

My only other real worry about this chapter is how Jacob comes across when he speaks or interacts with others. He often comes across as closer to an eight year old than a time traveler in an eight year olds body, especially in his word vomit scene with Remus and how impulsive and incautious he's being(although he's like that normally too). The reason for this is I'm trying to really think about how being in a younger body with an older mind would affect your reasoning and impulse control, you wouldn't maintain the same levels of control that you had in the future. So that's something I'm trying to show here, which may or may not work.

With all that out of the way, I bid you goodbye until the next chapter!