So sorry for the long absence, everyone! Between college classes and family issues, my creative juices have just been GONE for over a year now. But I'm working on getting back into fanfiction, and this story now has a new co-author: ilikeanimeandmanga! She wrote pretty much the entire chapter, so a big thank you to her! If you haven't checked out her stories yet, go take a look! They're awesome!

Thanks SO much for your patience, and please enjoy this chapter!

~Dark Maiden95

Chapter Five:

When the two Decepticons returned to the cave, they were greeted with a smug looking Rina. She had her arms crossed and a smirk on her face.

"You're back. Dad wants to see you guys, and boy you two are sure going to get it."

They winced at the last few words, knowing that Megatron was not going to tolerate any form of failure. Having no choice, they followed the small techno-organic inside.

Sure enough, as they walked in, they found Megatron sitting on a makeshift throne, clearly waiting for their return.

"Lugnut, Blitzwing," Megatron greeted calmly as Rina entered with the two wounded escapees, "Good to see you are still largely in one piece."

Neither titan replied as Rina took a seat on Megatron's shoulder, smiling at their miserable condition.

"Our deepest apologies for failing you, Lord Megatron." Lugnut bowed deeply to his master. "It will not happen again." Next to him, Blitzwing gave a bow of his own, wincing as he knelt down on one knee.

"You are forgiven, Lugnut," Megatron replied smoothly. "You two are not the first to fail me in the past few days. Soundwave was unsuccessful in his mission as well."

Lugnut and Blitzwing looked surprised, it was quite unheard of that Soundwave would have failed a mission seeing as how he was one of the most, if not the most, capable warriors among the Decepticons. But, that wasn't something they should ponder at the moment.

"Zat blasted techno-organic got in our vay!" Hothead Blitzwing snarled. "Had she not interfered vith our mission ve vould have been more successful!"

"Techno-organic?" The Decepticon leader looked at them curiously. "You don't suppose you are talking about Professor Sumdac's child now, are you?"

"No, zhere vas another one! She has red hair and green eyes!"

"Is that so..." Megatron was thoughtful regarding this information. A human girl with red hair and green eyes? Surely, it couldn't have been her. It was already clear that Soundwave had killed the girl.

But of course, surprises can happen and one can never be too sure if what they saw is real. Wasting no time, he commed. Soundwave.

:Soundwave, if you are functional enough, could you please come to the throne room?:

:Affirmative, Lord Megatron.: Was the static reply that Megatron got. It was clear that the communications officer still had a long way to recover before he could be active once again.

When Soundwave arrived, Megatron took in his functional, but dented, beaten appearance. Along with the fact that an Autobot had been dangerously close to off-lining him for good, Soundwave was currently not in the best of moods.

"What is your request, my Lord?"

"Could you show us the security footage? Of the day you controlled the Autobots and killed that human child?"

Without hesitation, Soundwave activated a holographic projection. The screen fizzled a little and eventually cleared to show the footage of a familiar looking alleyway. Before long, a teenage organic stumbled to few, blood gushing from her wound, and drops splattering onto the white snow. After staggering for a few moments, she collapsed.

"Zhat's her! Zhat was the organic that got in our way!" Hotheaded Blitzwing declared, pointing at the girl in the footage.

Silence followed the outburst, with Megatron and Rina looking quite surprised. Soundwave looked unfazed by the revelation, but had anyone paid closer attention they would have seen a small gleam reflecting off of his visor.

"That's impossible!" Rina cried. "I saw her body! She was obviously dead!"

"Now, now, Rina. This isn't going to change anything. In fact, it can be useful for us." Megatron smirked to himself as he silently mused over this new information and how he could incorporate it to his plans.

Oh yes, he though. It will be VERY useful indeed.

"Are you out of your processor?! What were you thinking?!"

Elena winced a little as the first thing she heard the moment she, along with Optimus and Jazz, returned from their mission in space was Ratchet scolding them.

"Ratchet, please calm down." Optimus raised his servos in hopes to calm the irate medic down, only to be proven futile.

"Don't you tell me to calm down!" Ratchet whirled on Optimus. "What on Cybertron possessed you to bring Elena along on your mission?! I've made it clear that she needs to recover! What if she had gotten hurt? Or worse, off-lined?!"

"Hey, it's not his fault!" Elena shouted, coming to Optimus's defense. "I chose to go myself! It was my decision, he didn't even know I was there until it was too late to send me back!"

Ratchet looked down at Elena and his frown deepened. "And just why would you do that?"

"I couldn't just watch them get beaten by the Decepticons! Someone needed to help them and I wanted to repay you for helping me!"

"Not only are you in no condition to be engaging in physical activities, but you have no proper training with your abilities! I don't understand what possessed you do to something so stupid!"

The entire room was filled with stunned silence. Elena was momentarily shocked before her expression turned into one of anger.

"Well, excuse me for not wanting to be dead weight! From what I've seen, you Autobots could use all the help you can get!" She shouted before storming out of the room, ignoring Ratchet's shouts to come back.

She stood outside of the abandoned factory where the Autobots reside in. Although it was cold outside, Elena had no intention of going back inside at the moment. Her anger over what had just transpired made her blood boil, her hands clenched tightly into fists.

"I just wanted to help, what was the big deal?" She grumbled to herself. "He didn't have to be a total grouch about it."

While Elena was lost in her thoughts, she was vaguely aware that someone was walking up to her and stopped just a couple feet behind. Elena didn't bother turning around.

"If you're here to make me apologize, forget it. I'm not going to."

"I'm not here for that, Elena." Elena turned around when she heard Optimus's voice. She looked up to see his blue optics staring at her in concern. "I just want to make sure that you were alright after what had just happened."

"Well, I'm fine, obviously. I'm just not sure he gets that."

Optimus let out a sigh and got down on one knee. "Elena, I understand that Ratchet is rather...um…tactless about dealing with his patients. But you should understand that he's not trying to intentionally upset you or anything. He's just worried that you could have seriously gotten injured since Decepticons are quite merciless with their attacks."

Elena looked up him, unconvinced. "Well, that's quite an unusual way of showing that he cares. I mean, he didn't have to say I was stupid for what I did."

"I'm aware of that. All I ask is that you shouldn't take it the wrong way. I've known Ratchet long enough to know that he tends to be hard on his patients only because he means well. "

Although she wasn't entirely convinced by his explanations, Elena did remain thoughtful for a moment. If what Optimus is saying was true, then maybe she could try ease up a little on her anger at Ratchet.

"...I guess I could try and go a little easy on him."

Optimus smiled at her. "And I'll make sure he isn't too hard on you, too. I've already talked to him about this, so I'm hoping that he won't be too tough on you later on. Now come back inside, it's freezing outside and you don't want that to slow down your recovery process, do you?"

Elena absentmindedly shook her head before a realization hit her. Since Christmas has already past, that meant that she had a few more days of winter break left. But because of the attack on her that day, she wasn't exactly allowed to leave until her body adapts to the changes made to save her life.

Which means she'll have to go back to school once she fully recovers.

Perfect…

Despite all the noise, Elena wasn't distracted from how nervous she was. Would she be accepted now that she could suddenly talk and hear? Would the other kids think she was a freak like some of them had in elementary and middle school? She hadn't heard the remarks they'd made, but she'd seen the pointed fingers as their parents hurriedly tried to hush them.

Making her way to science class, the redhead took her usual seat next to a Chinese girl. The girl seemed to be the quiet type; in every class they shared, the girl was either reading or drawing before class began. Today she was wearing a turquoise hoodie and blue jeans; she often wore these clothes, but the hoodie varied from day to day. Glasses sat on her face, and her jet-black hair draped halfway down her back. She hadn't really spared Elena much of a glance before, making the girl even more nervous than she already was.

But still, she definitely didn't seem like a mean person either, considering how she was one of the very few if not the only person who actually acknowledged her presence by occasionally waving at her as a greeting and never saw or treated her differently because of her former handicap.

Bracing herself, Elena reached over and tapped her on the shoulder to get her attention. "H-Hi..."

The girl turned to see her, and looked surprised. Her mind was currently trying to register that the girl that she previous knew to be deaf was now speaking to her. Finally, she recovered from her shock long enough to answer back.

"...Hi?"

"Hey...I know you're shocked." She gulped a little, but forced herself to continue talking. "But I wanted to tell you that I'm not deaf anymore. I had an operation during the winter break and was recovering from it."

"Really? That's actually...good. Great, actually!" The girl smiled a bit. "How does it feel now that you can hear and talk?"

"To be honest, it feels pretty amazing. I can't exactly describe it, but it just does. I'm just happy that I'm now finally able to do these things."

"I can tell. Well, now that you can communicate with everyone I guess it's time to have a proper introduction. I'm Sandra."

"My name is Elena, nice to finally meet you." Elena smiled.

"It's nice to officially meet you too."

Both girls giggled a bit at the statement. Elena looked over and saw that the sketchbook, something that Sandra often had with her, was open and on the open page was a drawing of one of the Autobots. It obviously wasn't done but it was detailed enough for the redhead teen to see who it was supposed to be.

"You're drawing an Autobot right?"

"Huh? Oh, yeah. I figured I could brush up on my robot drawing skills and decided to draw one of the Autobots."

"Hmmm...it looks like Bulkhead."

"Is that what his name was? I sometimes have trouble remembering people's names."

"That's fine. And yeah, that's his name. From what I've seen he's actually quite a nice guy." To herself Elena thought. And a bit of a klutz, too, from what I've seen of him so far.

"That's good to know, too bad that so many people are still scared of them."

"Well they shouldn't be. The Autobots helped out a lot in the city, even when their enemy, the Decepticons showed up."

"Of course, they're stupid."

Both girls giggled as more students started entering the classroom and sat down in their seats, waiting for class to start.

As Elena found out later during the day, both she and Sandra had Math and Art class together. This comforted her knowing that she'll have someone to talk to, or at least be comfortable around for two more periods of the day. Right now, the two girls were sitting inside the cafeteria eating lunch. Elena was once again overwhelmed by how loud it could be, considering how it was only students chatting with their friends while eating.

"So Elena," Sandra spoke while taking a bite out of her sandwich. "You said that you go your hearing back, correct?"

"Yeah, why?"

"Well then..." Sandra reached inside her Sonic and Shadow the Hedgehog messenger bag and pulled out her phone along with a pair of ear phones. "I'll need to introduce you to the best things of being able to hear. Put these in your ears first."

Slightly confused, Elena took the ear buds and put them in her ears under Sandra's instructions. The one marked "R" is for the right ear and "L" is for the left ear, easy enough. Once they were secure enough, Sandra started scrolling through her phone for something before clicking on the screen. Before Elena could ask Sandra what she was doing, she heard something coming out from the ear buds.

And whatever it was she was hearing had left her speechless. Her mind suddenly goes blank and she could have sworn that her heart, or spark, nearly stopped for a moment in surprise by whatever the sort of noise she was hearing at the moment. She couldn't find words

Sandra smirked a little in amusement at Elena's shock turned happy expression. "Like what you're hearing?"

"Yeah! What is this?"

"You're listening to what we call music. There's many genres, types to be exact, of music people can hear. Right now you're listening to classical music."

"Classical music?"

"It's music from a very long time ago that originated in European and created by people like Mozart, Beethoven, Bach, Handel, Tchaikovsky, and plenty more. Classical music is played by these devices called instruments. Right now you're listening to a music piece played by an instrument known as the piano."

"Piano? Wow, it sounds really beautiful."

"Yeah, it's quite relaxing to listen to. I didn't want to overwhelm you just yet with the other 'intense' music genres. If you want, I could let listen to some more."

"Yes, please! I really want to hear all the different types of music!"

Sandra smiled. "Okay, the next song I'm going to play is played by another instrument called the violin."

The rest of the day slowly went by for Elena, and when it was time for Art class she went and sat down next to Sandra. Luckily for them, their art teacher had no problems allowing students to use their electronics to listen to music as long as they get some work done. For Elena, since Art was one of her favorite classes, being able to listen to music was an added bonus.

So far, she has listened to music such as classic, country, pop, rock, jazz, techno, Celtic, movie soundtracks, and video game soundtracks. Sandra had later told her about the Japanese and Korean pop music that she herself had gotten into recently, right now she was listening to a K-pop song by a group called INFINITE.

"Hey Elena, do you have any plans later after school?" Sandra asked.

"Oh...uh, no I don't." The question kind of caught her off guard as she was accustomed to heading for home once school was over.

"Hmm...why don't go and get something to eat, then? I'm thinking of pizza."

"Pizza? Well...about that...I've never actually had that before."

Sandra seemed surprise, but it was kind of hard to tell just by looking at her face. "Never? Like never, ever?"

"Yeah. I live with my aunt, and she's pretty strict about the things I should eat." To herself Elena bitterly thought, And Aunt Rosa never has the time of day to take me out anywhere.

"That's too bad..." Sandra thought for a moment. "But it's not like you can't try now. There's a pizza place that's somewhere around here and I heard that it's really good. We can get a small pizza for you to try first."

"Okay, that sounds great!"

Two hours later, the girls were sitting inside a small, but spacious diner. It seemed to have a big city theme, with vintage-looking posters and newspaper clippings from Chicago, New York, St. Louis, and several other major cities across the country. Pizza pictures also decorated the walls, complementing the black and white checkered tile nicely. It almost resembled a diner from the mid twentieth century, but still had a certain modern flair to it.

"This is the BEST stuff I've ever eaten," Elena practically cried out, taking her first bite of pizza; she had ordered Italian sausage and pepperoni with the crust stuffed with cheese. Sandra had ordered the deep dish all meat pizza, with a side of Buffalo wings and breadsticks.

"I still can't believe you've never had pizza."

"Well, Rosa works at the hospital, so pizza is pretty much the spawn of everything evil in her book. Makes it taste even better, somehow, knowing she wouldn't approve."

"I never knew you were such a rebel," Sandra winked.

"Me neither. Guess I never really had a chance." Elena thought for a moment. "So…what other dangerously unhealthy foods have I missed out on?"

Sandra gave a slightly mischievous smirk. "Cheeseburgers, French fries, chicken tenders, milkshakes…I got a laundry list of them."

"What is this?"

Sandra and Elena's meal was interrupted by an unpleasant, snotty voice. The girls looked up to find a group of four girls the same age as themselves standing at their table. The brunette standing the closest to the table was looking at them with a sneer on her face. Sandra seemed to know this girl judging by the way she had an annoyed look she had on her face.

"What do you want, Melissa?"

"What I want to know," Melissa demanded. "Is why you're sitting in our spot with the deaf freak. This is where we always sit when we come here and no losers are allowed anywhere near it."

"Funny, because I don't see your name at this table." Sandra shot back. "Unless you marked it like a cat would, which would be very gross."

Melissa gaped in astonished fury. "Excuse me? I am not an animal!"

"Could've fooled me," Sandra mumbled. "And for your information, Elena is not a freak."

Melissa sneered at her before turning to look at Elena.

"Hey! You!" Elena blinked in surprised at how Melissa was talking, more like shouting, at her. "Why. Are. You. With. This. Loser?"

This made Elena frown. Now that Elena thought about it, she recognized this girl as the one from school who was constantly going up to her and yelling at her despite the fact that she was deaf. And since she was finally able to hear, what this girl was saying was now irritating her to no end. What right did she have to talk to her in such a way?

Elena took a small glance and saw that two of the other girls were snickering as if what Melissa was saying was amusing. The third one seemed to be snickering just like her friends were but, to Elena's mild surprise, it looked as if she was faking it more than anything, as if she's not comfortable with the whole situation. Elena turned to focus on Melissa, who was now smirking at her. If that's how she wanted to play this "game" of hers, then so be it.

"Uh, you don't have to yell," she finally spoke. "I can hear you just fine. Also, I really don't like your attitude."

Melissa's mouth was suddenly wide open in shock, as were her other friends. Sandra just smiled in amusement while

"No way, that's not possible!" Melissa finally stuttered out. "You were deaf! How could you hear and talk now?!"

"Um, there's this thing called surgery," Sandra answered in a matter-of-fact tone. "I'm pretty sure you know what it is."

"Yeah, that's right. I had an operation during the winter break and it took me a while to recover, that's all there is to it. There's no magic happening here."

Melissa took a while to register all the information before her face went back to a sneer. "Whatever, it still doesn't change the fact that you're both losers."

Sandra just rolled her eyes. "Didn't think it would, now will you please just leave us alone? We just want to eat."

Melissa just crossed her arms and sniffed, "No, I think we won't."

"And why not? We were just minding our own business before you guys came along."

Before Melissa could say anything else, a waitress walked up to them.

"Excuse me, but I'm going to have to ask you four to leave. You are causing a huge disturbance to the patrons here."

All the girls looked around and saw that it was true, nearly everyone at the restaurant was staring at their booth; some of them were glaring at the four girls that were hassling the other girls. With no other choice, Melissa relented and started to leave, but not before throwing a warning glare at Elena and Sandra.

"This isn't over, you freaks."

Once they were gone, Sandra breathed out a sigh of relief before putting her phone on the table, which Elena had no idea she had kept hidden until now. What she had been doing with the phone during that conversation, Elena didn't quite know but she'll probably find out eventually.

"Geez, I thought it wasn't going to end sooner than I thought."

"I know, but who were they?"

"Oh, that's just Melissa and her friends, Bethany, Megan, and Anna. You know, the type of mean girls you see in movies and TV shows."

"I guess, but it looked like one of them didn't look so happy when Melissa was yelling in my face."

"Oh, Anna? Yeah, it's kind of weird since she's always with them but she never really looks excited or happy with whatever her friends are doing, makes me wonder what's up with her. But enough of that, let's just finish eating our food."

Elena was more than satisfied once they left the restaurant. So far today, other than what happened earlier, she got to experience two new things that she hadn't been able to before. And judging by what Sandra said, there would be plenty more music for her to listen to and more tasty, yet unhealthy food to eat. She had to admit, her upgrade had brought her more good fortune today.

And yet, a part of her was nagging about the fact that she hadn't told Sandra about her techno-organic form, how she had to keep that information from her a secret because who knows how she'll react to that. She was the first friend Elena made in school and she really didn't want to lose that so soon.

But still, Sandra didn't seem like the judgmental type and had already admitted to being a supporter of the Autobots. If anything, she seemed like a laid back, trustworthy person. Maybe it wouldn't hurt to confess to her, she still did have the Autobots and Sari to talk to.

"So, you ready to go home yet?" Sandra asked, breaking Elena out of her thoughts. This was it, there was no turning back for her now.

"Um, actually, can we go somewhere private? I need to tell you something."

"Okay, sure. Where to?"

"Come with me, I'll show you." Elena prayed that things would go well for her.

After walking a while, they were standing at an open area, with a couple of abandoned buildings around them. With no one else around, it was the perfect place to talk.

"What exactly is it that you want to talk about?"

"Well..." Elena looked down at her hands. "You know how I told you that I got an operation over the winter break?"

"Yeah, you did. Why? Is something wrong?"

"No, nothing's wrong..." Elena gulped. "It's just that...when I told you I got an operation to restore my hearing…that wasn't exactly the whole story."

Sandra frowned. "There's more to it? What do you mean by that? Did something happened?"

"You can say that. You see, the operation I had wasn't really meant for getting my hearing back, what happened was that-"

"Oooh, look vhat ve have here!" A voice interrupted Elena.

Both girls looked up and to Elena's horror, Random Blitzwing suddenly landed in front of them, looking at them with crazed glee.

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