After the war, a traumatized Lomax helped hunt down his torturers, but Nagase was the one that got away. Lomax spent the next five decades dreaming of revenge and looking through war records to locate his old nemesis, but to no avail. Then, in 1993, he finally found Nagase, arranged a meeting (according to Lomax's wife, with every intention to kill him), and then ... they got along rather well, actually. It turned out they had a lot in common.

mirror.co.uk

When he reunited with Lomax on the same bridge they'd both helped to build (one more than the other), a deeply shaken Nagase unleashed a torrent of tears and apologies. And he meant it. After the war, Nagase was plagued by guilt and helped the allies find mass graves along the railroad. From then on, he devoted his life to charity. Lomax and Nagase found that they were both haunted by the horrors of the past in similar ways. They even had the same pastimes, like writing, collecting documentation, and having horrible PTSD-induced nightmares. Fun stuff.

Lomax and Nagase stayed good friends for the remaining 18 years of their lives, and their story inspired a film called The Railway Man with Colin Firth and Nicole Kidman (as Lomax and his wife, not Lomax and Nagase).

independent.co.uk

Right before Christmas 1982, Tommy Pigage got behind the wheel of a car with his brain marinating in almost three times the legal limit of alcohol. Utterly blitzed, he careened into the vehicle of young Ted Morris, who died on Christmas Eve. Ted's parents, Frank and Elizabeth Morris, were obviously devastated, but their grief evolved into smoldering animosity when Pigage was sentenced to five years' probation instead of prison. That's a pretty light penalty for destroying this happy family:

Ap via Lawrence Journal-World

Oh wait, that's not the Morrises smiling next to their son -- that's them with their son's killer. Sorry. Our fact-checker's getting fired over this one.

Understandably, the Morrises' first impression of Pigage was less "let's invite him for dinner" and more "that guy should die." They yearned for his demise, but failing that, they settled for obsessively shadowing Pigage, hoping to witness some freedom-ending probation violation. As part of that probation, Pigage had to spend two nights a month behind bars, so Mrs. Morris made sure to stop by the jail on those evenings to make sure he didn't miss his appointment.

Peter Ginter/Photodisc/Getty Images

Ironically, the Morrises' change of heart was made possible by the very probation which drove them to hate-stalk Pigage in the first place. Another term of his release required Pigage to recount his crime to high schoolers during those fun lectures organized by Mothers Against Drunk Driving. An extremely mad(d) Mrs. Morris attended his first talk, prepared to boo him -- but contrary to her expectations, Pigage didn't shirk responsibility for killing her child. He cast himself as a murderer who got a wrist-massage in lieu of punishment.

Pigage looked like "a whipped little puppy" in Morris's eyes, and she even reached out to him after his talk ... only to smell alcohol on his breath. Boom. Probation violated. Back to jail. The Morrises got what they wanted! The end.

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Only, no. The Morrises now felt bad for Pigage, and began visiting him in jail. Before long, they were securing the court's permission to borrow him for church and other non-jail activities. Mr. Morris, a UPS driver / preacher, even performed an impromptu baptism on him after a tearful apology. With their support, Pigage was able to get out on probation again, kick his addiction in the ass, and turn his life around. Meanwhile, the Morrises realized that helping him was also helping themselves, since actively hating someone every day isn't exactly the best way to mourn, regardless of what decades of revenge movies have taught us.

Also, it turned out that hearing firsthand how society was shafting blacks was an eye-opening experience for the Klansman. Ellis was there to "disrupt everything that everybody was trying to do," but he had the shocking realization that black people get a shitty deal. Withering hardship was the whole reason he joined the KKK in the first place, so he started to question the whole blind prejudice thing.

Eventually, the pair recognized that the animosity between them was ruining any chance they had of helping black or white children. Disheartened by their folly, they cried together and ultimately buried the hatchet. Ellis left the Klan and, over the following decades, repeatedly teamed up with his new BFF to fight social injustice in all its forms. At Ellis' funeral in 2005, Atwater sat on the side of the family. By then, she'd granted him a title much cooler than Grand Exalted Cyclops: "brother."

Grant Halverson via southerncoalition.org

WARNING: We've had prisoners of war, drunk drivers, and the KKK in this article so far, but this is where it gets really heavy ...

The most "heartwarming" thing that could happen now is this guy showing up.

Miraculously, the part-Rasputin kid survived -- the bullet left him blind in one eye, but caused no brain damage. The stab wounds were all superficial. Carrier was found six days later, chillin' on a rock. He later described the whole ordeal as "a walk in the park," and now we're officially more scared of him than the kidnapper.

As for McAllister, he knew he would eventually get caught (when the cops showed up at his house, he asked what took them so long), but then ... he wasn't. There was no evidence incriminating him. It wasn't until 1996, long after the statute of limitations expired, that he confessed to the abduction. And so, Carrier finally confronted his kidnapper and ... became his only friend in the world.

AP via southcoasttoday.com

At that point, McAllister was 77 years old, blind, and languishing in a nursing home with no friends or family. No one would have protested if Carrier had spat in his face and laughed at his misery. But rather than opening up a can of cold vigilante justice, when McAllister apologized to his victim and got all weepy, Carrier told him "that from now on there would be nothing like anger or revenge between [them], nothing except a new friendship." If this guy had been Bruce Wayne, Gotham would have ended up with Welladjustedman.

baptiststandard.com

And Carrier didn't stop there and scamper off with an awkward goodbye. He and his young daughter continued visiting McAllister to read him Bible passages, bring him smoked amberjack, and ensure he was being properly cared for in his final weeks.

See, we told you that was heavy. Now how are we gonna top this?