The next night, just the way they'd planned, Tommy and his fellow Animorphs all met up outside the Chapman house. Just behind a hedge that bordered the house's front lawn, in fact. He and Rachel, being the tallest in the group, were practically down on their respective stomachs so they could stay out of sight of anyone who might be looking their way.

"Look, a kitty door!" Jake exclaimed, though he kept his voice low enough that no one would be able to hear him, or at least Tommy hoped they wouldn't.

"Where?" Marco asked, looking around in clear confusion.

"See the lines of light?" Jake pointed out. "At the bottom of the regular door?"

"Oh, yeah," Marco said, sighing softly. "I wish the moon were out; I can't see a thing."

"That wouldn't be very good for us," he said, looking briefly up at the sky before turning his attention back to his fellow Animorphs.

"Yeah, I guess," Marco said, folding his arms and side-eyeing the house they were all crouched in front of. "Let me just ask you this, though: why did it have to be Chapman? I was afraid of him even before we found out he was a Controller."

"You're still not upset over that detention he gave you, are you?" Rachel asked, a look on her face that seemed to suggest that she was teasing him. "Look, if you're going to listen to your CD player in math class with an earphone hidden in your hair, you have to remember not to start singing along."

It was all he could do, after hearing that, not to burst out laughing. "You actually tried that?"

"We're not here for that," Jake said, though he sounded like he found the whole thing funny, too.

"I still say that Chapman would have never given me a whole week's detention if he was fully human," Marco said, a firmly unimpressed look on his face.

"I have a question: how are we going to get Melissa's cat to come outside?" Cassie asked, bringing their attention back to what they were really here for.

"Good question," Rachel said.

"Yeah, we should probably try to keep from having to stay here for too long," he said, looking around to make sure that no one was getting close enough to see them.

Once they'd managed to find the cat they were looking for – Tommy had to remind himself more than a few times not to laugh outright at the name Fluffer McKitty – Rachel and Cassie had quickly volunteered to catch the cat they needed and bring him back to the carrier. Of course, nothing really went the way they wanted it to go; it was starting to become a pattern, really.

And, soon enough, Rachel had asked Tobias to bring her a mouse, so she could lure the cat down from the tree he'd climbed up when Rachel had tried to catch him.

"Are you sure you're going to be okay doing this?" he asked, as Rachel caught the mouse that Tobias had dropped down to her.

"Don't worry so much," she said, smirking at him in a way that he couldn't help but think looked more than a bit cocky. "I can handle this."

Stepping back slightly, knowing that Rachel probably wouldn't listen to him if he tried to talk her out of it, Tommy kept watching. Even if he couldn't talk her out of doing something so dangerous, he could at least be there for her while she was doing it. So, when she started morphing into the shrew – that's what Cassie had said it was, but he hadn't gotten a close enough look at the tiny thing to tell – he moved in closer. And, when she'd gotten small enough to fit in his hand, he quickly picked her up.

She'd be a lot less likely to panic if someone she knew was holding her, or at least that was the basic idea.

"Rachel?" he called, as his friend finished the last of her morphing and sat in his hands, little nose and ears twitching for a moment, before she started scrabbling in his hand as if she was actually scared of him.

When she tried to run off of the edge of his right hand, though, Tommy quickly closed his left around it, holding on even as he felt her sharp teeth digging into the meat of that hand between his thumb and pointer-finger. Gritting his teeth as Rachel's sharp teeth tore through his hand.

"Tommy, are you- Geez, you're bleeding!" Cassie exclaimed, grabbing his hands as he kept holding on to Rachel's tiny shrew body.

"Yeah," he said, forcing the words out from between his teeth.

He could definitely feel the blood, running down his wrist and dripping from his elbow as he continued to hold onto Rachel's tiny shrew body as best as he could in spite of that and the pain he was currently feeling. Once Rachel had managed to get a hold on herself again, she went off to lure her friend's cat down from the tree he was in.

He still couldn't help wanting to go with her, when she inevitably made her way into the Chapman house…