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It was under Remus' own protection that the eventual traitor — a coward like himself — who would get James and his wife killed was allowed to get close enough to betray them. Remus' childish uneasiness about potentially having someone resent him for not including them led to the death of two people he would've easily died for.
During school, it had been fine. Peter had been easily intimidated but never got into any sort of trouble beyond what naturally came from being friends with unrepentant pranksters. He always came off as rather wishy-washy, but he seemed loyal enough to the other three.
Remus functioned as the conscience of their group, but it was admittedly a faulty conscience. James and Sirius occasionally got rather mean with their jokes, and Peter was too weak-willed to say anything beyond the praises of hero-worship, which left Remus out-numbered when it came to discussions of severity. Remus definitely did not approve of their relentless bullying of Lily's childhood friend in a flawed attempt to impress her, but he loved James and Sirius so much and was so grateful for their acceptance that he did not stand up to them as much as he knew he should have.
He had let his fear of losing his friends compromise his morals. His fear of being thought of badly worked against him quite often, but he didn't have the courage to change. When they inevitably found out that he was a werewolf, but didn't shun him with impunity, he found himself too attached, too deeply grateful, that he could no longer bring himself to try to reason with them, even when his duty as a Prefect demanded it.
Who else would accept him like his friends did? How could he risk them hating him by getting them into trouble? He couldn't! He couldn't risk it because then they might tell people about his condition and then everyone else would hate him as well! They swore they wouldn't ever tell, but he could still end up alone.
By the time the four of them left school, You-Know-Who's ascendancy was almost complete. True resistance to the evil bastard was concentrated in the underground organisation called the Order of the Phoenix, which all four of them joined. James and Sirius were full of vim and vigour about taking up the good fight, but Remus was half out of his mind with fright most of the time and Peter appeared to live in a constant state of terror.
And then one day Peter merely became anxious and twitchy.
They should have known it then. Remus should have known it then, or at least suspected; Peter only ever got that way when he was (badly) trying to hide that he was involved in something he knew would not be approved of.
The death of James and Lily, at the hands of He-Who-Must-Not-Be-Named, was one of the most traumatic events of Remus' life. His friends meant even more to him than he could put into words because he had long since accepted the fact that most people would treat him as untouchable, and that there could be no possibility of marrying and having children. Even worse, within 24 hours he had also lost his two other best friends. Remus was in the north of the country on Order of the Phoenix business when he heard the horrible news that one of them had murdered the other, and was now in Azkaban, a traitor to the Order and to Lily and James themselves.
The downfall of Voldemort, such a source of jubilation to the rest of the wizarding community, marked the beginning of a long stretch of loneliness and unhappiness for Remus. He had lost his three close friends and, with the Order disbanded, his previous comrades returned to busy lives with their families. His mother was now dead — a casualty in a Death Eater attack — and while his father offered sanctuary, Remus refused to endanger his father's peaceful existence by returning to live with him.
All his fears were coming to life. His friends . . . He was alone . . .
A depression that he never really grew out of plagued him. He assumed it was partially attributed to his condition, his lupine instincts in turmoil at the loss of his 'pack'. Remus began to live a hand-to-mouth existence, taking jobs that even he acknowledged were far below his level of ability, always knowing that he would have to leave them before his pattern of growing sick once a month at the full moon was noticed by his workmates.
Remus' greatest regret when thinking back to this point of his life was not even trying to find out how Heri was being raised. It was a self-loathing cycle that he was too weak to break out of.
Remus had assumed that someone far more competent than he would ever be had taken the appropriate measures to raise Heri in a good environment. Why wouldn't they? Heri was exalted as a saviour, the hero they needed when they thought all was lost. She was now the stuff of legends, even worship (he had definitely heard about a religious sect proclaiming that Heri was Neutral Good incarnate, gifted from the gods, because only a pure soul of unaligned goodness could bounce back the inherent evil of the Killing Curse*). She certainly wouldn't need or want a useless, diseased failure like Remus around. She didn't need a person that was a part of the reason she was an orphan looking after her.
In the end, it wasn't a desire to do right by Heri that had him taking up Headmaster Dumbledore's offer of a teaching position, it was his craving for a sense of what he once had and a desire to be in the presence of some small part of James and Lily that was still in the world.
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