He looks to the Greeks, the Egyptians, the Babylonians, the Romans…all civilizations with ties and—more importantly—documentation on resurrecting the dead.
When his father disappeared, he left behind a library teeming with tomes on the very subject. His grief at Hope’s death made him desperate and drove him to madness (a family trait, it would seem). Remus told Sirius he wouldn’t, but… Sirius wasn’t there; he’d been hiding as Padfoot in their own home for weeks, avoiding the painful emotions of their new reality.
Sirius isn’t here, and Remus’s grief is, and it’s poignant and white-hot, a gaping, raw hole in his chest, letting all the air escape and leaving him cold and hollow and lost, because his first friend…his sweet, kind, loving Lily is dead. James is dead. Their child cries for them every single night and it wasn’t supposed to be like this!
It wasn’t, it wasn’t, so he reads. He consumes book after book, translating dead language into dead language into Latin into English, cross-referencing and steeling himself for what he is to do. What he needs to do. For Harry. For Sirius. For himself…
Sirius rescues him from his madness on the new moon, finally a man again. He tears Remus away from his father’s desk, pulling and shouting and begging: “Do not do this, Remus! This heart is where you truly live! This heart! Here! With the living! With me!”
And Remus crumples, his intricate casting broken, the gates closed, and collapses in his arms. He can’t do this. His father failed for a reason. His father hadn’t wanted to lose his humanity. Remus has no humanity to lose (that died in the ragged festering void his mother and Lily’s deaths caused), but he can’t leave Sirius and Harry alone… He needs to let James and Lily go.
