Pepper? You are honestly going to make him cry one of these days. His eyes sting a little, but he doesn't move to give away his tears by wiping at them, and while she's looking down he blinks furiously to try and dispel them.

"And I am sorry," he says quietly when he trusts himself to speak. "For all of them. But I...there's something I could have done to stop him, to save her. There has to be."

That sure is a Freudian slip there, Gene. He doesn't seem to have noticed that he accidentally started talking about Zhang and his mother rather than Malicant and the hatchlings.