Deleted Scene I
Asparagus

A/N: Well, this is likely to be interesting! I was having a chat with the lovely Dayari, and she requested a couple of one shots – one of which was a particularly interesting one that goes all the way back to How We Seared the Sky. If you’ve got a good memory, you’ll remember that Alexis once asked Sam why it was that he knew the Spanish word for ‘asparagus’... and Dayari wanted to find out. So, ladies and gentleman, without further ado... I present possibly the most ludicrous piece of writing in the fandom... Asparagus. For you, Dayari – enjoy!

Next up will be a request for the awesome SDG.

Requested by: Dayari

Please note that this is set before the Transformers arrived on Earth.

“It’s a bean.”

“... It’s asparagus, Miles.”

“You friggin’ idiot – look, it’s a bean. It’s a friggin’ bean, dude.”

Sam Witwicky smacked a palm over his eyes, vaguely wondering whether being fourteen years old was meant to be this hard. This may have been the birthday vacation that he had waited a lifetime for, but now he was starting to think that being younger – before his teenage days – might have been a tiny bit easier.

Whilst Ron and Judy were wandering the Spanish market idly, both wearing wide-brimmed hats and tinted lenses that made them look, rather tragically, as if they were trying to be ‘cool’ and ‘funky’ – as their son suspected of the two of them – Sam had been abandoned with Miles, who had been the lucky addition to the Witwicky family for this weekend break to Alicante, at a tiny booth that sold a medley of interesting-looking fruits and vegetables, all of which could be liquefied and poured into plastic cups for the naïve tourists stupid enough to drink them.

... Well, not them.

They would not succumb to this...

“¡Zumo de manzana!” the Spanish stall owner tempted them, dangling an apple by its stalk in front of the bemused boys and jiggling it about in an attempt to make it look more attractive. “¡Es completamente delicioso, chicos... pruebes, pruebes!”

Miles shook his head. “What is he on...?”

“Come on, Miles,” Sam sighed, nodding dutifully when the deranged man scooped up an entire handful of the blushing fruits and practically shoved them under his nose in his enthusiasm. “You got, what, a B minus in Spanish? You must be able to understand some of what he’s saying. Don’t act as blond as you actually are, man...”

“Pfft – whatever. Like you understand him.”

It was too hot for Sam to argue; he just brushed a hand over his upper lip and mentally switched off.

He couldn’t remember the last time he’d been this hot – maybe the last heat wave in California, but he was sure that it hadn’t been this hot. They had only been out of their apartment for an hour, and already he longed for the air conditioning in his white-tiled room... the neatly pressed sheets... the cold, invigorating fan that he always kept on full blast. The sun was positively baking him, the cotton of his t-shirt seeming to soak up its heat and deep-fry him from the inside out.

Tengo mucho calor, he thought to himself miserably.

Miles, in the meantime, appeared to have surrendered to the small, brown-skinned Spaniard. He was digging in the pockets of his cut-off pants, rattling the change in a manner that made the man spasm with impatience at every clink of coin against coin.

“What you buy, sir?” he asked, clearly deciding that money could buy his customer the honour of hearing their native language.

“Those,” Miles grunted, stabbing a finger towards a stiff bunch of asparagus that had been tied together with a twine of straw. “Can you put it in the mixer, dude? I wanna try them. Beans, yeah?”

The man’s suntanned features screwed up in apparent confusion beneath his hat, his bushy eyebrows furrowing as if someone had asked him what the square root of nine hundred and forty two happened to be. “Mixer, sir? What is this mixer?” he asked confusedly, shaking his head. “You forgive me, I speak little English... you want buy those, ¿si?”

“Zumo,” Sam put forward tentatively. “Zumo de... uh... asparagus.”

From the enlightenment on the man’s face, Sam half-expected to turn round and see Jesus behind him.

“Ah, ¡zumo de espárragos!” he exclaimed, applauding Sam in the kind of zealous manner that was usually reserved for wartime heroes. “Muy bien, señor. It will be ready en dos minutos, okay? You sit on that table there and you wait – I make your zumo de espárragos and bring it to your friend – ¿algo más? You like some too?”

Sam’s eyes bulged in panic. “Uh – no, no, I’m okay –”

“Okay?” the Spaniard confirmed cheerfully, having the selective hearing of any good store clerk. “Is good; I make you some too.”

“No, really –”

“I make half price, ¿vale? I give you two for price of one,” he implored, unwrapping the bunch of the accursed asparagus as he did so and laying several of the thick, green stalks out onto the tabletop. “You like; yo prometo.”

Condemned, Sam muttered a vague assent and shuffled off to his designated seat as Miles put the cash on the table.

Hell, this was bad. This was really, really bad. Seeing as Miles had obviously never heard of, tried, or had any prior experience with asparagus, then he wouldn’t know about the strange phenomena that the vegetable was associated with. Marcel Proust had once claimed that asparagus ‘... transforms my chamber pot into a flask of perfume’ - and, having eaten it himself on more than one occasion when his mother decided to be adventurous with food, he well understood what the guy had meant.

Miles slumped into the neighbouring seat a few seconds later, looking enormously pleaded with himself. “Ah, this is gonna be good,” he sighed contentedly, pushing his shades up his nose and tilting his face into the sunshine. “Nice cool glass of veggie mash in Spain...”

“Miles,” Sam said through gritted teeth, “Why did you just spend all that on friggin’ asparagus juice?”

“Look, man, you’ve gotta relax. Feel the love.”

Sam let his head hit the table with a thump as he despaired. Really, it was no wonder he and Miles were the most unpopular and geektastic of the geeks that attended Tranquillity High.

A particularly loud group of people suddenly snatched his diverted attention, and he glanced up wearily to see a Spanish - or maybe Mexican – family arguing amongst themselves, standing close to the booth that they had just purchased the Doom Juice from. A small, grumpy-looking little girl was standing with a pout and a scowl, whilst her father appeared to be tempting her with a doubtful-looking carton of food; the woman, on the other hand, was looking around and shouting stridently for ‘Carlos’.

He pitied Carlos, whoever he was – the volume of the woman’s voice was akin to that of a foghorn.

“Lala, come on...” the man was wheedling the little girl in heavily accented English. “You’ve got to try some Spanish food – don’t you like Nana’s alligator soufflé? You know their meat is good for growing girls, yeah?”

Alligator soufflé?

“Don’t like it,” the child groused.

The guy shook his head and grimaced. “Damn. What are we gonna do with you, mi pícara?”

Sam shook his head, sweat already beading on his brow at the thought of what other kinds of food might have contaminated the asparagus that was currently behind mashed into a thick, green, gluey pulp in a food processor by the vendor. He hummed cheerfully to himself as he opened the lid and poured the mashed-up juice into transparent cups, highlighting to everyone around them that truly were stupid, stereotypical tourists.

“¡Zumo de espárragos!” the man carolled, placing the enormous cups in front of Sam and Miles respectively. “Enjoy, chicos – drink!”

Thinking that a polite smile and a nod might send the sombrero-wearing madman on his way, Sam managed a tiny grin and gave him the thumbs-up. Miles, having now seen the consistency of what he was about to receive, had gone pale and was visibly perspiring.

So in a sense, his best friend was grimly contented when the man simply refused to leave.

The small, elderly Spaniard stood over them as they silently gawked at their beverages, gesturing with his hands and encouraging them to drink in front of him so that he could see the delight – or pain – that would soon contort their faces, nodding and giving them a gap-toothed beam that seemed to glint with devilish mischief as Miles gave Sam a look of absolute desperation.

“Don’t look at me, man,” Sam shrugged. “You asked for it.”

“You drink!” the jolly command from the man came a split second later, followed by a repertoire of gesturing that almost took Sam’s head off. “You drink, por favor.”

Time to use the only Spanish he knew to get himself out of this.

“Ah – lo siento, señor,” he apologised in his very best Spanish accent, patting his stomach and looking pained for a moment as a facial indicator of his abdominal discomfort. “Tengo un dolor de estómago, asi que no tengo sed.”

... wow.

Damn, he so wished that his Spanish teacher could have heard that.

The Spaniard blinked his large, chocolate-brown eyes, squinting at him curiously before he nodded slowly. “You are American, señor?”

Busted!

As Sam flushed like a scolded schoolboy and mumbled something incoherent about still being a beginner – though he was almost a hundred percent certain that his speech had been pretty much flawless – the vendor rounded on Miles, eyeing him expectantly. Quailing under the look that he was receiving, Miles began to stutter out what could only be described as ‘Spanglish’ – excuses poured out in a horrific, unpractised medley of both languages, making Sam cringe in his seat as the man’s eye twitched.

“Miles... stop...”

Clearly realising that he was digging himself deeper and deeper into a bottomless hole, Miles slowly quieted, trailing off before he gulped under the Spaniard’s look. Slowly, he reached out a trembling hand and took a hold of the cup of asparagus juice, peering into its snotty depths as if looking into the fathomless pit of Hell itself.

“Go on, man,” Sam encouraged quietly. “It won’t take a second... it’ll all be over soon...”

The sweating blonde gulped, looking as if he was mentally preparing himself for what he was about to do. Then he took a deep breath, squeezed his eyes tightly shut...

And downed it.

Sam eyed his long-time buddy doubtfully as he swallowed the viscous sludge and cracked one eye open, looking at the bottom of the glass as if he couldn’t quite believe that only dregs of slush remained. He lowered it slowly, his hand steady, and then looked up at the vendor and nodded, his expression satisfied. “It’s uh, good.”

The vendor grinned and shuffled away, looking pleased with his success.

Miles sat for a moment, his grey eyes watching until the Spaniard returned to the booth and started on the orders of the family that they had seen earlier. Then he leapt up, his face turning as green as the liquid he had just consumed, and made a break for the bathroom.

Espárragos.

... no, he wouldn’t be forgetting that in a hurry.