STAGGER

by Tonzura123

Disclaimer: I own the drunk, but not the king.

At precisely 1:23 AM on October 31st, 2019, the water exploded.

It was something like an explosion, anyway, with lake water blasting everywhere and rocking the small vessel that carried its lone drunkard in her hull.

This particular drunkard- whose name was Idris Irving- was a former professor of Marine Biology at the local University. He had been kept on for almost twenty years. Then last autumn his liver failed him for the first time. It had always been testy, even as a child. He went to many doctors and underwent many advanced procedures. For a little while, he thought he might be healed. But after he witnessed his wife of eleven years being more than a little forward with one his rather strapping associates, he gave it all up to the bottle, and set out alone in his dad's old fishing boat, The Staggerer. Idris soon found that he still had the ability to appreciate this after a half-hour of straight-chugging.

And, four months after the fact, it still roused a giggle from him.

On this particular night, he had set out around the cape and drifted aimlessly in the choppy black waters. Other boats passed for a while, but soon he was alone. It was a clear but starless night. He sipped delicately from a brown bottle and watched the faint shadows of bats claw across the black. Small shrieks and wings of skin.

Down gulped the last stinging mouthful.

And that's when the lake exploded.

Now, the center of the blast was not ten yards from the aft of his boat. It threw him forward so that he went from sitting to flailing. The boat pitched dangerously forward on the bow and crashed back into the water with a resounding smack that flattened Idris out again. He lay there, bruised and breathless, and peeped over the edge to see if any bombs were falling from the sky.

Thunder boomed, but there were still no clouds or bombers. The waters around him, which had been roughly rocking, suddenly ceased.

The lake grew utterly still.

It was eerie. The boat stopped rocking and held its breath. The wind disappeared and the sounds of the town ceased altogether in the dark.

His ears hurt with it- a silence so loud that it became a faint ringing, all around him. In his stupor, he seriously considered the idea that it might be some kind of monster cousin to Nessie. Across the waters, he could barely make out the lights of his street.

And then he couldn't see the lights of the town at all, because a golden glow was growing in the deep.

It began as a dot on his vision, then a coin-sized dot, then a plate, then the whole of the lake below his vessel was gleaming brightly. He threw up an arm over his face, watching with weeping eyes, as a human figure began to form inside of that glow.

A strong wind ripped past him, one violent gust like a fist or a scream. Arthur, Arthur! whispered a voice into his ear. He turned, but there was no one there.

Instead, an arm, covered in silvery mail, erupted from the deep. Clenched in it's fist was a long and glittering sword. And then a second hand, sprouted beside it and pushed down on the water and with a sucky, watery sound, a golden head reared and gasped at the night air. Then the light vanished, and all Idris could hear was panicked splashing and a curse in some foreign language. Or maybe it wasn't a foreign language, and he was just too drunk to tell.

"Myrddin!" came the strangled voice. "Myrddin! Myrddin!" There was some sputtering, and then something metallic clanged against the side of The Staggerer. All splashing seemed to stop, but then it renewed in earnest and two gloved hands appeared on the side of the dangerously rocking boat.

"No!" cried Idris. "No! No, get off my boat! Get-off-my-boat!"

He grabbed an oar and weakly struck out, but a hand came up and grabbed hold and was surprisingly (or not so surprisingly) strong for a drowning man.

There was another clang as the sword fell to the bottom of the boat, then a crash as the man pulled himself over, and a splash as The Staggerer took on more than a little water and weight. Idris panicked and began bailing with his cupped hands, smacking portions of the lake back in as quickly as he could. The strange man lie on the bottom, gasping and coughing and shivering in full armor.

"Myrddin," he wheezed, and fainted.

And that's how a drunk ex-Marine Biology professor with a failing liver and a pending divorce came to be in charge of King Arthur Pendragon, the Once and Future King.

A/N: *sing-songy-voice* Heeeeee's BACK!

This story is a sort of sequel to "Emrys Emergent," but you don't have to read that to know what's going on. Yet. In the event that this becomes a multi-chapter fic, I might change my mind.

Questions? Comments? Completely unrelated remarks? You know what to do!

As Always,

-Tonzura123