"Gotta warn you, Cassie." Marco sounded surprisingly morose. "Erek shows up here, I might tell him to get bent. You'll have to take care of him." Adulthood hadn't necessarily served to make Marco more mature in some aspects. Grudges, for instance, were still a big part of his being. Pacifistic or not, you didn't remove the only option available to your allies for retrieving one of their own alive. It just didn't work that way.
"Yeah," he agreed. "She would have." He sighed, drooping his head slightly. "Sorry to be the bearer of bad news." And he genuinely was. He and Rachel may not have been superawesomebestfriends, but they got along more than they argued and Marco respected her as a soldier. He'd been the only one not really disturbed by her descent into what the others considered "darkness", partially because he knew one of them needed to get dark and partially because he saw the other extreme as foolish.
"But." He made sure to lock eyes with Cassie for this. "She died so that the war could end. So that we could stop sacrificing our own blood. So that the Yeerks could be completely defeated, beyond all hope of recovery. And so that the self-righteous idiots that ran the Andalite military wouldn't waste the entire planet." He smiled, just a little. "It was a good death. I actually kind of admire her for it..." And then he smirked. "But if she shows up here, don't you dare tell her that. I'll never hear the end of it."