He followed as they all turned tail and swam back toward the island. His mind was still back on the woman commanding the sub; still stuck on the fact that his mother had returned to Earth, but was still his enemy. Sooner than he would have expected, but mostly owing to the fact that he hadn't been paying attention, Marco found himself beached.

Quickly demorphing from his now-cumbersome dolphin body, Marco sloshed out of the water not too far behind the others. Jake didn't even have to give the order before they all started morphing into their seagull forms, but he gave it anyway just so Slade wouldn't be confused. He tended to be really anal about getting orders before he did anything, in or out of a fight.

He might have thought that it was just the way the guy was, except for the way Shara looked at him when he did that. He'd never known Ness Carter, even as just someone he passed in the halls on the way to class, so it wasn't really like he could make too many assumptions about the way Slade was acting now.

Running at the ocean the way most of the others had done, Marco flapped and circled to gain altitude. In the air, he met up with the others, and they all wordlessly made their way back toward the city. He'd had some homework to do when he'd been sent home from school, and he wasn't really looking forward to it.

It wasn't nearly the same feeling he got when he thought about confronting his mother again, but it definitely wasn't looking forward to it by any stretch of the imagination. But still, it was something normal to do; maybe it would help take his mind off things.

When his house came back into view, Marco took a quick flight around to make sure there was no one who would notice and perhaps comment on a seagull flying into someone's house. Even if he did live there when he wasn't busy trying to save the world from an alien invasion.

One of two that he knew about, but he didn't know just exactly what the Radam were capable of; still, judging by the way Shara had handled those sharks, they weren't the kind of creatures he'd want to mess around with.

Just his luck that they chose to invade this planet.

Flopping down on his bed, Marco started demorphing as fast as he could. Concentrating on his normal body as hard as he could, he finished the demorph and sat on his bed. With the return of his human body and the responsibilities that came with it, he reluctantly fetched the book that he'd chosen to read for his English class.

He wasn't going to do it just yet, though. The fact that he was hungry notwithstanding, if he didn't make at least a token appearance in front of his dad, the older man was likely to call the police or something equally drastic. It was a nice change from the shell-shocked indifference he'd been dealing with before his father had made the decision to take charge of his life for the first time since his wife had "died", but it had its fair share of disadvantages.

Heading down the stairs to the living room, Marco was relieved to note that his father was nowhere in evidence. It would be much more simple to convince the man that he'd missed him coming in through the front door rather than through one of the upstairs windows if he wasn't in the living room to see his son walking down the stairs.

He found the old man in the kitchen, standing next to the phone.

"Hey, Dad."

"Marco, hi," he said, grinning. "I was just going to come get you. So, what would you like for dinner?"

It took a fair amount of self-control for him not to make a face. "Anything but fish."

"You want some pizza?" his dad asked.

"Just make sure it doesn't have any anchovies," he said, then turned to leave.

He could hear his father's shout of confirmation as he made his way back up the stairs, so he felt better. It wasn't like he'd forgotten watching Shara butcher those sharks like any number of beef cattle – that was pretty much why he'd refused to eat anything fish-related for at least the rest of the day – but he was working to put it behind him.

Back in his room again, he decided to bite the metaphorical bullet and hunt down the book he'd chosen to read for his assignment. Finding the battered softcover under a dirty, faded gray sweatshirt that he'd tossed on top of his desk a few days ago, he stared at the cover.

The book itself was the first in a trilogy; it was also interminably long and Marco found himself wondering, not for the first time, just how he was going to manage to read the whole thing in the time he had left. He'd only picked the first book in the series, but even that was three times longer than any normal book had a right to be.

The only thing worse would have been if he'd picked one of Tom Clancy's books, which were about the same length or longer.

"What was I thinking, choosing a book this long?" he groaned rhetorically.

Given the fact that he'd had the entire previous month to read the book, he didn't have so much of an excuse as he might have had otherwise. Taking one more look at the imposing paper brick on his desk, Marco decided that he wasn't going to start reading that right now. Flopping down on his bed, groping for his headphones and settling them firmly over his ears.

Fumbling around for a few seconds, he found the remote control for his CD player and turned it on. He hadn't changed discs since four days ago, so he knew exactly what kind of music he would e getting.

"Bob Marley, mon," he implored, his voice muffled by the pillow over his face. "Help me out, mon."

The song playing at the moment, however, was not one that he would have ever chosen to listen to on his own. The strains of Bob Marley's "No Woman, No Cry" translated entirely too easily into "No Mother, No Cry" with the mood he was in.

"Great," he muttered, his annoyance at the world in general and his CD player in general muffed by his pillow. "Let's just wallow in complete and utter self-pity."

While it might have been true that no one had actually called him an out-and-out coward, he'd still been the first to turn tail and run at the first sight of sharks. And, while it was true that he'd had more than his fair share of bad experiences with those bloodthirsty, killer fish – up to and including being bitten nearly in half my a tiger shark – nothing could make him forget that he and he alone and run away first.

Even watching Shara mercilessly butcher those killers – as satisfying as that sight had been – didn't make him feel better about the fact that'd he'd abandoned his friends to face a fate that, if not for the intervention of someone far more powerful than he could ever be, would have been deadly. The fact that no one had called him on his cowardice almost made it worse.

Not to mention all of the tumultuous feelings that seeing his mother again – knowing that the thing that lived in her head would kill him without a second thought if she ever found out what he was – had stirred up for him.

As horrific as it had been to have his mother die, or appear to die, anyway, there had at least been something of a finality to it. Death was an end, at least. It made sense, of a terrible sort, but it was still something that could be understood, taken in, and dealt with.

There were groups for people who had lost one or both parents to accidental death, and the shared pain was supposed to make it less. It didn't always seem to work, and he personally hated the idea of inviting people to pity him for any reason, but he knew that there were some people who would be comforted by the idea of sharing that kind of pain.

He just wasn't one of them; never had been, never would be.

Still, what they had was better than what he could have: there was no support-group for people who's mothers had been enslaved by an alien presence in her head. There was no therapy for someone who knew – beyond all hope of doubt – that the thing that wore their mother's face would kill them without mercy if she ever had the chance.

Of course, it was more than possible that this was what Jake felt every time he sat down for a meal with Tom. Marco had never – and would never – ask about something like that. It just wasn't in his nature, and he doubted Jake would be eager to discuss the situation in the first place. Neither of them were ones for discussing messy things like emotion with too much frequency or depth.

That was one of the things that made them so close.

Moving the pillow away from his eyes, Marco stared at the picture of his mother that he'd kept next to his bed every night since his mother had vanished. He still didn't know just who he wanted to see when he looked at that photo each night before he slept. He didn't know if it was the mother he had lost that he was seeing, or the one that he wanted – somehow – to rescue.

He just didn't know anymore.

Sometimes, he would fantasize about how and when he would rescue her from the Yeerks. How he would keep her locked up for the three days it would take for the Yeerk in her head to die. Then what? He would always ask himself, what will you do once Visser One is dead?

He'd fought the Yeerks long enough to know that that wouldn't be the end of things. There wasn't a chance that they could get away with doing something that audacious and dangerous; the Yeerks would hunt them down for as long as their was a single Yeerk alive on Earth.

And, if he was ever caught and infested, that would be the end of the resistance. The Yeerks would know everything there was to know about Jake, and Rachel, and Cassie, and Tobias; even Ax, Slade and Shara wouldn't be safe…

"I am way too young to have to deal with this kind of stuff!" he shouted into his pillow.