Tommy could hardly process what the rest of his fellow Animorphs were saying, looking at the wound that Marco had sustained, the way his tail had nearly been bitten off by one of the sharks they had been fighting. He'd thought – he'd been hoping, really – that what had happened to him had been the worst injury that any of them had ended up with. Sure, the fact that a chunk of one of his tail-flukes seemed to have been bitten off by one of the sharks they'd attacked was bad enough, but at least he could still swim.
Marco would never be able to swim back to shore with those kinds of injuries.
(Oh, man! I don't want to die as some fish!) Marco exclaimed, sounding almost like he'd have been crying, if that kind of thing were even possible in dolphin form. (I don't want to die out here! My mom drowned; I don't want to die like she did! My dad…)
(Morph!) Cassie exclaimed, drawing all of their attention before anyone else could start panicking. (I think I know what to do: morph back to human!)
(Here, I'll morph too,) Tommy said, getting as close as he could to Marco. (When you get your arms back, wrap them around my shoulders. I'll get us back to the surface.)
(Right. All right,) Marco said, though he still sounded shaken by the whole thing.
Tommy could fully sympathize.
As the both of them started morphing back into their human bodies, Tommy relaxed just a little as he saw Marco's unharmed, human legs emerging from the severed remnants of his dolphin tail. As Marco's arms emerged, wrapping around his shoulders just the way he'd instructed the other boy to do, Tommy kicked his legs and swam for the surface as fast as he could. He'd closed his eyes as soon as he'd started feeling the salt water stinging them, and as soon as he felt his head breaching the surface, he opened them while breathing deeply for the first time in awhile.
As he tried to regain his bearings, while at the same time letting Marco recover from the horrible thing that had just happened to him, Tommy felt something rising up underneath the pair of them.
(Tommy, it's all right,) Cassie called up. (The whale, he's… He's offered to help us.)
Keeping his right arm around Marco to steady him, Tommy couldn't help but wonder just what else was going to happen on this strange day; given what they were looking for, he suspected that this wasn't going to be everything.
