Chapter Text
Arthur taps the ends of his flippers on the boat floor as he waits for the signal. His mask is on, his mouthpiece in, and his oxygen is functioning right as it should be. All he has to do is wait for the boat captain, Percival something or other, to okay him to jump into the frigid lake waters.
Five years lead up to this moment. Five years of research, and pitching that research, and going to cocktail parties of the rich and famous who could care less about Britannic history so that he could beg on his hands and knees for funding. Five years of fighting with department heads and sleeping at his desk.
And now the only thing holding him back from finding what could be the real, genuine burial place of Excalibur was a 193 cm man in overalls.
He fidgets with his mouthpiece, squeezes his teeth around the black rubber, tugs a strand of hair free from the pinch of his mask. It’s warm inside his wetsuit but Gwaine is shivering under his three layers as he fights with his iPad. He never thought he’d be doing this with Gwaine of all people, Gwaine who turned everything into a competition and left his stubble in the hotel sink and ruined Arthur’s favorite skillet in university because he’d been distracted and left it on the hot stove.
But Gwaine is smart, too, and can recite the first half of le morte d’arthur when sober and the second half when he’s plastered, and he cares about this dive as much as Arthur does. He flashes Arthur a smile when he looks up from his notes, and Arthur is too excited to flick him off as he usually would. He’s certain that it’s here. Texts, local lore, everything points to this lake. He just has to get to the bottom and prove it.
The boat engine cuts off and they slow to a stop. Elyan grunts as Percival asks him if he could please throw the anchor so they don’t drift. It’s fifty pounds and half Elyan’s height, and he waddles to carry it overboard. He kicks Gwaine’s shoe before he can say anything. Elyan and Gwaine are another strange pair, married for as long as Arthur’s been married to this lake but bickering as if they’ve been together since the sword was thrust into the stone. Arthur supposes that any companion of Gwaine’s is an unconventional one, by means of it being Gwaine.
Arthur leans back, his hands gripping the railing and his flippers off the floor, waiting for the signal. He’s so excited he almost doesn’t see Percival raise his hand with his thumb and forefinger touching, the universal okay .
He mirrors the signal, takes a deep breath, and falls backward. He smacks hard into the surface and goes under.
The water is fucking cold .
It only gets colder as he goes down. The water is murky and the Wales sun doesn’t provide much warmth in the first place. He clicks on his flashlight and continues his descent. He checks his depth gauge when he reaches the bottom. He’s only at twenty meters, but it could be fifty or even a hundred - the light from above is already long gone and his flippers are kicking up silt, leaving him squeezed in by the dark and cold. He’d been trained for this, but it’s still oppressive, and claustrophobia claws at his chest.
Arthur pushes his anxieties aside and gets to work. They couldn’t dredge the bottom because of how delicate the subject of their find is - Arthur doesn’t really believe in the legend of an indestructible sword, he’s not a serf from the sixth century and he doesn’t believe in magic, and it would be far too easy to completely destroy a priceless piece of history. The closest they could get was scanning for metal at the bottom, and it landed him here, right where his own metal detector is flashing slow and green to reveal that there is nothing. Not to the left, or the right. His heart thuds in his mouth. He shoves his hand into the loose silt and pushes backward. There is something here, something big , he’s just swam too far ahead or to the side. He just has to find it. It’s here . It has to be.
Then - a flash, orange, on his left side. The flashes pick up in speed when he holds it over a divot in the earth. He kicks forward just enough to hover directly over it. He flexes his fingers before he starts to dig. The dirt comes away freely under his hands. It floats up into his face, clouds him until he cannot see, but he can carry on through touch. He’s elbow deep when his hands touch something solid.
His heart skips a beat.
He feels around it. It’s round, and bizarrely smooth rather than pitted with rust as he expected Excalibur to be. He can’t see his metal detector well enough to know if it’s made of metal, but something in him pulls toward the sword, something deep in his stomach that tells him this is exactly what he’s looking for. He carefully starts to dig around it, and his lungs are tight in his chest as he feels a handle, and he’s digging furiously now, and--
And that is a hand .
Arthur yanks away, so startled he loses his mouthpiece. His mouth fills with icy water and dirt. He catches it back in his hands and replaces it, purging the water from his mouth and the tube. He takes a moment to breathe, to collect himself. It’s cold. He’s tired. It may have been a tree root, or an eel, or… something. It didn’t have to be a human hand. It couldn’t have been a human hand, because if it were then it was perfectly preserved and lifelike, and nothing could be buried in this much dirt and not be hundreds of years old.
Arthur presses his mask more firmly against his face with the back of his hand and dives back in. He’s not going to waste five years because he was spooked. Not him, not Arthur Pendragon. He’s going to see this through if it kills him.
His stomach turns. There’s no way it isn’t a hand. Four fingers wrapped loosely around the sword’s hilt, a thumb hooked just below the blade. It’s attached to an arm, which, deeper, connects to a torso. So well preserved it’s as if the body died hours ago, as if it could still be alive.
Arthur isn’t equipped to carry a body to the surface, but now that he’s found it he can’t just leave it here. His mind races with the possibilities - how many things could be brought to light with this discovery. How much they could understand from whatever era it’s from by its clothes, the contents of its stomach, the state of its teeth. His body is vibrating .
He checks his oxygen gauge to see how much time he has left. It reads full , which cannot be correct, because he must’ve used half by now at least. His depth gauge, too, is off. It reads sixty meters - and he’s rather confident that’s wrong, because if he were at sixty meters then he’d be dead. He taps it with his finger, and it flips to zero, then down to twenty, then up to ten, then down to forty. He’d swear, if he could open his mouth.
Instead he wraps a lead around the sword, and then gently around the wrist of the hand, and makes his ascent. Broken instruments make this dive ten times more dangerous than it needs to be. The last thing he needs is to run out of air and drown.
Save, when he reaches the surface, Gwaine hollers with a fear in his voice that Arthur has never heard before, and Elyan almost throws himself overboard pulling Arthur up and into the boat. Arthur shoves them away and pulls off his mask as he spits out his mouthpiece, shaking the water from his hair and breathing hard.
He completely ignores their concern as he says, beaming wide, "There's someone down there ."
"What the fuck are you talking about?" Elyan asks, reaching for his husband's sleeve. "Christ, Arthur, are you delirious?"
Arthur ignores him. He looks down at his wrist and taps his depth gauge. Zero, and staying put. He checks his oxygen gauge. Zero. "Lucky," he breathes.
"Arthur, what the fuck happened? You were gone for hours ."
"What?" Arthur comes to attention at that, letting his oxygen gauge drop to his side. "I only had enough oxygen for an hour, El. I couldn't have been gone that long. I'd be dead."
"You should be dead!" Gwaine says, gesturing wildly at him.
"Your clocks must be wrong, then." Gwaine shoves the iPad in his face. Five twenty eight. He'd dropped a little before three in the afternoon. "What the fuck?"
"That's what I said!" Elyan shouts. "We were about to call for a body recovery."
"Weird, definitely weird," he says, "but I think I have you beat."
Elyan and Gwaine look at him like he's insane, but he dives into his story anyways, about the sword in the dirt and the body attached to it, and how his instruments acted completely bizarrely despite working fine before and working fine now. Finally, he raises the lead.
"It's here," he says, giddy like a child on Christmas morning, "Excalibur. We found it."
"Am I the only one thinking about the dead body?" Elyan asks. "It's-- you said it's practically alive?"
"Yeah," Arthur giggles. "Like it died an hour ago."
"That could just be the adipocere," Elyan warns him, "it'd feel like flesh through your gloves."
"No, I can tell the difference," he says. "We might have a mummy in the grade of Xin Zhui, guys. Think about what this means - all of the history that's about to be unlocked!"
"It could be King Arthur himself," Gwaine says to himself. "We might've found King Arthur's final resting place."
"Shit, shit, shit! " Arthur says, and grabs Gwaine by the biceps and shakes him. "We found King Arthur's tomb!" Then, careful not to get his own hopes up, tacks on, "Maybe!" Gwaine jumps into Arthur's arms with a delighted scream, and Arthur grabs Elyan to pull him into the celebration.
When Gwaine is released again, he puts his hands on Arthur and Elyan's shoulders.
"Boys," he announces, "I believe we deserve a drink."
They attach a buoy to the lead, because the sword has been there for however long in pristine condition anyways and it can survive for another day. Percival takes them to the closest bar they can find, and they start drinking like it's the last night of their lives.
They get completely shitfaced. Arthur can't remember half of it. He has a fuzzy memory of Percival's tongue in his mouth and laughing into a very big shoulder.
He wakes up the next morning in the hotel shower wearing socks but no pants and sporting a god awful crick in his neck. Even then, the moment he comes back into full consciousness, he's laughing. He did it - he did what no one could do for thousands of years. He found the Excalibur, and possibly King Arthur, and if not then a monk or scribe or noble from that time which is just as good, really, in the grand scheme of things.
He almost wants to give his father a call just to brag, after his father had denied him funding and told him his entire quest was pointless and childish.
I'm about to turn the academic world on its head - how's that for pointless?
They do their fair share of vomiting and complaining and taking copious tylenol, but not one of them are in poor spirits. Not when they're picking up a body bag with splitting headaches and sunglasses, and not when Arthur gets confused putting on his wetsuit.
The sword is beautiful, intact, and polished. There's rune work on both sides of the blade, but he isn't sure what it says. He takes pictures of the blade for Guinevere, Elyan's older sister. She did her thesis on medieval weaponry. As expected she shits a brick. She promises to send the inscriptions to someone who can translate them and get back to him. The entire day is looking to be a success beyond their wildest dreams.
And it only gets better when they discover that Arthur was right about the body. It's pristine. Even the clothing is intact - a perfect example of dark ages nobility.
"Tall for someone of that era," Elyan says, and Arthur nods.
"And his clothes are expensive, looks like. Wonder why they threw him in this lake."
Gwaine grins.
"That's for us to find out."
They stay for the next week doing dives every day, in case there's anything they missed, but they don't find anything more. A grave for a man of this stature should've been adorned in jewels, cloth, finery of all kinds, preserved just as he was, but there's nothing. Nothing but a man curled around a sword.
"It was odd," Arthur remarks, as he pulls on his gloves. He'd asked, well, begged, to be a part of the first autopsy. Thank god he had the qualifications to even be in the room. "You'd think he would have been prone, laid to rest. But he was practically in the fetal position. Like he was protecting it."
"Everything about this is fucking odd ," Gwaine answers, pushing his hair from his face with a headband. "Scripture from the time suggests that isn't how people were buried, then."
"What if no one buried him?" Arthur asks quietly.
"What, like he killed himself? I don't think that's possible." Gwaine fits his face mask over his ears. Arthur tugs the sleeves of his polyethylene gown over his wrists. The elastic is scratchy and uncomfortable. They always leave his skin red at the end of the day. It's worth it, for this. He'd cut his hands off for it.
"Just spitballing," Arthur defends. "Like you said, this isn't how people were buried." He presses his back against the lock bar to enter the room where they've been keeping the body. "I wonder if he was lonely."
"There you go again, getting sensitive," Gwaine teases. "If you hurry, you have time to get a quick cry in before it begins."
"Shut up, Gwaine," Arthur says, giving his name an extra syllable just to piss him off. He lets Gwaine in the room first, but stands on his toes to look over his head and on the metal table in the center of the room.
The air is punched from his chest. Washed of dirt and disrobed, with a cloth over his torso to preserve a two thousand year old modesty, the body is perfect . His hair is close cropped and black, his limbs long and pale, no scratches or missing tissue. His skin is even pinkish, as if his heart still beat inside that dead chest.
"He's gorgeous," Arthur says, wide eyed.
"He'd be hotter if he wasn't dead," Gwaine whispers back. Arthur punches him in the shoulder hard enough to send him back a step.
"If everyone is here, we can begin," the conductor of the autopsy states.
They take measurements of his height, written next to his weight. They jot down notes on his ethnicity and possible age next to their plans for MRIs and X-Rays.
"Look at this," the conductor says, a short and portly woman with deep set eyes and strong hands. She takes the body's hand in hers and gingerly turns it palm up. She presses her thumb, hard, into the center of his palm. It turns white and yellowed. Then, it floods with pink. She looks up at him, her eyes squinting with her smile. "It's like he still has circulation."
"Have you ever seen anything like this?" He asks.
"Never," she says. "Look at his eyes, too." Arthur does as he's told, gently pulls his eyelids apart. His eyes are sharp and ocean blue, ringed with a slightly darker hue. Most importantly, he can see them.
"They're cloudless," he says with amazement.
"Incredible, isn't it? I can't explain it. I can't explain any of it."
Arthur is almost beside himself with joy. He allows himself the narcissistic pride of bringing something so puzzling and new to a room of scientists that spend every day pondering the same hundred and thousand year old queries.
If Arthur squints, he can see the red capillaries crawling over the body’s sclera. He holds his eyelid open with one hand and lightly touches the corner of his eye with the other, interested in how the membrane holds under his finger, when the body’s eye turns in a rapid movement and hones in on him.
Arthur can't help it. He screams.
He jumps back into another scientist and almost bowls them over, because he works in the field and the scientists that specialize in this kind of shit are always more scrawny than he is. He catches his footing right before he sends them both to the ground.
"Jesus, Arthur!" the conductor shouts, and Arthur raises his hands in surrender. He's still catching his breath. This body has given him enough heart attacks for a lifetime.
"Sorry, I'm sorry, I--" he lets out his panic in a sharp exhale and clutches his chest. "His eye moved, I thought he was looking at me."
They all look sceptically at the body, the same doubt passing through their minds at once. But it's not possible. Even if he were alive when Arthur found him, he couldn't be alive now , because he was left underwater overnight and hadn't moved. He’s dead as a doornail.
"Let's start wrapping this up," the conductor says. "I've got the heebie jeebies."
The last thing they take is a blood and tissue sample. Gwaine takes the sample. Everyone else hangs around his shoulders as he does. After Arthur's outburst they're all skeptical of getting close to it. However superstitious and ridiculous it may be, it still makes unease skitter up their backs to get too close.
The moment the needle pierces the body's skin, the lights go out.
There are some screams. Someone grabs Arthur's shoulder, and he holds onto them. A crash to his right brings out another round of startled yelling.
The lights flick back on. One of the scientists is on the ground next to a flipped tray. Gwaine is reaching behind him, his hand twisted in Arthur's gown.
The body is sitting up, his blue eyes wide and manic, clutching the cloth to his body.
When he speaks, the foundations of the building rumble.
"Beth yw'r uffern !? "