When he and the rest of the Animorphs all got together for their planned infiltration of the Yeerks' Royan Island facility, it was at least a weekend. Jake and the others had planned it that way, so that the rest of the Animorphs wouldn't end up getting in trouble with their various parents, but now that they were all gathered together on the beach, Tommy couldn't help but wonder if Marco was really doing all right.
He'd had two close calls with sharks, and even though he didn't seem to have been injured this latest time, that couldn't have been an easy thing to deal with.
Still, Marco wasn't really the kind of person who could deal with sympathy, or tell someone who sympathized with him apart from someone who pitied him, which he really seemed to hate. So, Tommy just tried to support the younger boy as best he could without being obvious about things. He didn't know just how well he was actually doing, not without speaking to the younger boy, but Tommy liked to think he was making at least some kind of a difference.
It was all any of the Animorphs could really do, in the end.
Once the seven of them had all morphed into the shark they had acquired, Tommy found that the shark's single-minded craving for blood reminded him entirely too much of the ant that he and the rest of the Animorphs had morphed. Back when they'd tried to infiltrate the house of their school's vice-principal – a human-Controller, just like Tommy's own adopted parents – in an effort to give Ax a way back home. They hadn't managed to succeed, but the infiltration still stuck in his mind.
The Animorphs as a whole had sworn off ant morphs, after everything that had happened.