He saw it because they wanted him to see it.
The feed flickered to life on the tablet Reginald thrust into his trembling hands — a grainy, sun‑washed frame from some cheap camera set up in the room where they'd kept his parents. For weeks, the rebels had filmed them: gaunt faces at a metal table, hands stained with sweat and soot, a spool of wire, a scatter of crude schematics that were not the ones they'd been given. The clip jumped and stuttered — minutes ripped, then resumed — but the faces were unmistakable.
Ayaka's hair was a mess. Lines scored her cheeks. She was the first to speak, voice thin as paper but steady enough to cut through the static.
"Karl," she said, and even through the poor speaker he heard the softness that had tucked his hair when he was small. "If you're watching this… by the time you see it, we'll be gone." Her smile trembled. "I wanted to be there when you grew up. I wanted to see you get angry at the dinner I make, to show you how to plant a garden. I wanted to teach you things a machine never could."
She swallowed. Tears glistened in the corners of her eyes and she laughed once, a small, broken sound. "If there's a way I could steal back those years…I would. But I can't. So…grow up big and strong, okay? For me."
The camera slid. His father was in frame then, shoulders hunched over a tangle of metal. He looked older than the portraits Karl remembered — older than any of the steel and contracts could explain. When he looked up, his mouth tried for levity and it cracked into something that hurt to watch.
"Sorry, Karl," his father said, voice rough but trying for lightness. "I'm not sure they'd let us walk away even if we built what they wanted. So we had another plan." He set the final piece in place with hands that had designed death-dealing machines with the same precise patience. "We're not building their bomb. We're saving everyone from the bomb."
His fingers brushed Karl's mother's hand across the table. For a heartbeat she smiled like a child given a secret. "You'll be the son of those who chose to end one horror to prevent a greater one," his father added, a rueful softness beneath the pride. "Won't that be something? National heroes. Don't—don't let the name Kurogane rot. Carry it so we're proud of you."
Ayaka began to cry then, quietly at first, her voice breaking like weather against stone. "We weren't there for your childhood," she said, and the words came as if each one had lodged in her throat for months. "We raised weapons instead of raising a family. If I could fold time back, I would have stolen an evening, a laugh — ordinary things. I wish we could have built a time machine and lived them with you. I wish I could tell you shek — tell you how proud I am." She stopped, pressed a shaking hand to her chest as if feeling the last steady beats. "Grow up, Karl. Make a life that's kinder than ours."
Her sob cracked into a laugh that made Karl's skin go cold on the tablet. "Promise me," she whispered. "Promise me you'll be better."
His father's hand found hers. He leaned in, and for a second — a private, defiant second — the machine in the room was just a machine and they were a family again. "I'm leaving everything to you," he said, voice thickening with an honesty Karl had never needed but always wanted. "Every penny, every patent, every name — it's yours. Don't drag the Kurogane name into the mud. Make us proud. I'll be watching."
The footage cut then, a rip in the signal. Static, a hiss, and then the rebels barged in — men with hard faces and harder guns, swearing at the two of them for not building what they were ordered to build. The camera caught the rebels' jaws, the way they spat contempt at the improvised device.
"This isn't the blueprint!" one of them barked. "What are you making?"
Ayaka lifted her chin to meet them like an offering. "We are making a promise," she said. Her voice was soft but open enough to carry across the small, hot room. "We are choosing the country over your terror."
One rebel laughed, ridiculous and small. "So you'll blow yourselves up? Save us all by killing yourselves?"
Ayaka's eyes narrowed. She glanced at his husband and back to the rebels. "We will not let your bomb ever be used. We will not let you sell this weapon back to those who raised you. We will not be forced to choose between the lives of innocents and our lives." She reached for Itsuki's hand. "We do it so others live."
They stood. They kissed — long and fierce and heartbreaking — two people who had once missed birthdays and graduations but were finally choosing, in the most terrible way, to be present. Then, the camera captured the final sliver of normality: a hand to a device, a breath counted, a look exchanged where no words were needed.
The screen burst white.
The feed died in a bloom of light that seared the edges of Karl's vision. The monitor went black. Reginald's hand trembled over the room's console and then, for a moment, nothing moved. The antiseptic smell rushed back, metallic and sour.
Karl heard his own voice before he felt anything else. It was small. Lost. "Why… why didn't they take me?"
There was no answer. Only the echo of the blast reaching them on feeds and distant sirens that would never catch that little patch of desert. On screen or off, the choice had been made: they had taken the only cruelty they could control into their own hands and starved it of meaning by sacrificing themselves rather than letting it be used.
He dropped the tablet. His knees gave. For a long time he simply sat there with his face wet and his breaths shallow, the sterile light of the hospital ceiling swimming above him.
The rebels had wanted him to watch. They'd wanted the weight of what his parents had done to press down on him, to be a lever they could use. Instead it became the crucible that remade him. The last images — his father's crooked half‑smile, his mother's hands on his cheek — burned into him, indistinguishable from the smoke and ash that would become the world he woke into later.
When Reginald finally spoke, his voice was small, almost apologetic. "They… they said— they said it was the only way."
Karl didn't answer. He felt nothing and everything all at once: grief, fury, a cold, calculating quiet settling into the places where panic had been.
Outside, the city carried on with a million trivial noises: a tram, a distant radio, a dog barking. Inside, everything that had been steady and small and safe for him had been unknownly exchanged for an absence that would grow and harden into the rest of his life.