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The first clue is also the last clue because after that it's pretty fucking obvious: it's a sword, arrowed by a golden beam of light, sticking out of a stone in a way that's really dirty if you're a sixteen-year-old boy.
After the requisite "Are you fucking kidding me?"s and "This is a joke, right?"s, they try to pull it out, because ha-ha, sword in a stone, that's hilarious, except that Boyd can't get it out, and neither can Isaac or Jackson and Erica is really determined but she can't get it to budge either. Even Stiles tries it, because hey, if everyone else gets to be a werewolf maybe he can convince himself that he's King motherfucking Arthur, and doesn't move it an inch. When he gets close to it, he hears it emitting a low, restrained hum, like a chorus of increasingly impatient angels who can't quite remember the words to the song as they kill time.
Derek tugs at it, once, and then gives everyone a look, like, See? This was dumb.
And then Scott pulls on it, just to see, and it slides out. The humming becomes a full-on wall of music, the kind of bowel-clenching Jesus chord that churches whip out to display the glory of God, and on top of it a hundred disembodied voices shout "All hail the Once and Future King!" Flowers spring out of the ground despite it being January, woodland creatures gather on the edges of the clearing like the opening sequence of the Lion King, and before Stiles is quite aware of what's going on, he's dropped to one knee. And so has the rest of the pack.
Scott, holding the sword aloft in that same golden sunbeam, says, "Uh. What?"
Stiles's Jeep has seen many bizarre conversations. This may just be the strangest.
"This is crazy."
Stiles sighs. "I thought we agreed not to say that anymore after you turned into a werewolf."
"Yeah, but I mean, werewolves are, you know, but King Arthur?"
"I find your arbitrary suspension of disbelief disturbing."
Scott's eyes glow with frustration, and his voice is all growly when he says, "Speak English!"
"Look at it this way," says Stiles. "Free sword?"
Scott lets his head fall back against the headrest, hard. "I can't be King Arthur."
"Well, you shouldn't be able to be a werewolf, either, but try telling that to the full moon."
"King Arthur wasn't a werewolf!"
"You know, I don't think the original legends took a definitive stance either way on that."
"Also," says Scott, "we're not even in England! Isn't he an English thing?"
Stiles makes a show of grabbing at the steering wheel. "I sense a great disturbance in the Force," he says. "As if a thousand historians cried out, and were suddenly silenced."
"Also," says Scott, "I'm Mexican!"
"And now we know that reincarnation is colorblind. Can we move on to the part where this is awesome?"
"It's awesome for you, you're not the one who has to deal with it!"
Stiles pulls over so that he can guiltlessly turn to stare Scott down.
"Scott," he says. "This isn't you trying to kill me every five minutes or turning into a wolf or getting caught up in crazy werewolf power struggles, okay? This is you being the reincarnation of King Arthur. What is the downside."
Scott thinks for a long moment, and then says, "…huh."
"Yeah." Stiles starts up the Jeep again.
After a minute, Scott says, "If I'm King Arthur's reincarnation, do you think that means I know how to use the sword?"
"Holy shit, let's find out."
He can't. It only takes them two hours of waving the sword around in Scott's backyard to figure out that, one, swords are harder to use than they look, and two, Scott doesn't somehow innately know how to use the sword. Also, three, the sword is not Excalibur, no matter how many times Scott calls it that.
"Dude, look, you pulled it from the stone so it's Clarent, okay? Not Excalibur."
'Wounded' doesn’t begin to describe the look Scott gives Stiles. "Did you just name my sword Clarence?"
"Cla-rent," says Stiles, popping the “t” for extra clarity. "That's the name of the sword in the stone. Sometimes. It's complicated, nobody really agrees. I wrote a paper on it for Econ once." He shakes his head. "I don't think Finstock truly appreciates my genius."
"Hey, if I'm Arthur, who does that make you?" says Scott.
"Huh. Maybe Lancelot? Or – nope, definitely not Lancelot, never mind."
Scott narrows his eyes. "Why not Lancelot? Isn't Lancelot, like, Arthur's right-hand man?"
"Yeahhhh," says Stiles, drawing it out. "Uh, until he slept with Guinevere but I have no intention of ever touching Allison, I swear, and also she'd kick my ass. Oh, shit, you don't have a sister, right? You'd know if you had a sister. And you know what, why do we have to be anyone, anyway? You can be Arthur and the rest of us can be new, special Knights of the Round Table, except with claws and Google instead of swords or lances." His eyes light up. "Can we wear capes?"
Scott wrinkles his nose, and Stiles can tell he's thinking back to their brief foray into LARPing in the Beacon Hills Preserve when they were thirteen, also known as That Time They Discovered That Long, Flowing Capes Look Awesome But Trip You Up But Good, also known as That Time Stiles Broke His Wrist and Scott Had His Worst Asthma Attack Ever.
"Okay, yeah, maybe not," says Stiles.
The next time Scott goes to work, Deaton smiles at him warmly and says, "All hail the Once and Future King."
Scott says, "What the fuck?"
Stiles, who gave Scott a ride and likes to see the kittens, says, "Wait, are you Merlin?"
Deaton just smiles again and tells Scott to clean out the dog cages. Although he does tack on a "sire."
Scott being King Arthur actually changes very little. He still has to take summer classes so he doesn't get held back (including European History, the irony of which makes Stiles laugh so hard he nearly pukes), and it doesn't actually change much of the pack dynamics. Occasionally Erica will get snarky at Derek and say something like, "Why shouldn't we vote you out of being Alpha and vote King Arthur in?", and Jackson is jealous for about five seconds until Lydia whispers to him you realize Arthur dies, right? and then he looks fine again. Stiles makes everyone watch Monty Python and the Holy Grail so many times that Derek snaps the DVD in half.
Clarent gathers dust on Scott's shelf, and, honestly, everyone almost forgets that it's a thing at all. There are no invading armies of Saxons or any castles to be found, but there is, Stiles is disappointed to say, a definite dearth of maidens waiting around in the Preserve for a knight in shining armor. Scott doesn't even bother telling his mom, and when Allison finds out, it's when Lydia explains the joke after someone calls Scott "Your Highness."
Honestly, it's not that big a deal.
Except weird things kind of keep happening.
Not often, but often enough to kind of keep it on everyone's radar. And not just the time that Isaac and Boyd fill Scott's locker floor to ceiling with packets of King Arthur flour. That wasn't so much weird as inspired.
But the first day of school, Allison pulls Stiles aside and says, "We have a problem. Have you met the new kid?"
"Uh, I thought you'd be kind of the last person to be new-kid-phobic," says Stiles.
"His name," says Allison, "is Mordred."
"…oh, shit."
And thus begins Operation Figure Out Who The Hell Would Name Their Kid Mordred And How To Keep Him From Killing Scott. They keep Scott and Derek out of it – Scott because he's the one who is potentially a murder target, and Derek because his approach to problems like this tends to be tear-throat-out-first-ask-questions-never. So it's pretty much everyone else who's in on it, by making sure to be his physics lab partner or offering to help him out with his homework or asking him how he likes Beacon Hills or if he's ever killed anyone ("Okay, Jackson, one, learn some fucking subtlety, and two, ever heard that saying about glass houses?").
Only it turns out that Mordred's actually a pretty nice guy whose mom had a badly-timed obsession with Marion Zimmer Bradley and a soft spot for underdogs. He's also a freaking physics whiz, which brings Isaac's GPA up by half a point, and once he starts the Beacon Hills High Glee Club, they decide to give it a rest and call it a coincidence. Especially because Stiles bribes him to corner Erica with the rest of the Glee Club and serenade her with Shakira's She-Wolf.
So basically he's good people, although they all keep it in the back of their minds to keep an eye out. Just in case.
The lake thing is a bit weirder. It's the full moon and there's an Omega with subtlety issues in town, so everyone's in the Preserve trying to herd him and get him out of town before something bad happens. Because if there's anything they've learned so far, it's that something bad always happens.
They've got him cornered at the lake's shore, and Derek is giving him his Alpha lecture when all of a sudden that fucking golden beam of light and chorus of angels is back, emanating from the center of the lake. A sword breaks the surface, stabbing through and spraying water everywhere, held by a delicately female hand, and then the rest of the woman follows. She wears a gown of white and a crown of gold, her hair billowing down her back to trail in the water with the train of her dress, and motes of dust dance around her. Stiles thinks, wait, isn't it nighttime? Then he thinks, did I accidentally take acid and nobody told me?
The woman says, in a voice like a thousand bells ringing, layered with intricate harmonies and melodies, "All hail the Once and Future King!" and holds out the sword to Scott.
Who stares at it. "I don't want another sword – I don't even use the one I already have!"
"Scott," Stiles hisses at him, "take the fucking sword."
"But - "
"Take it," says Allison, and of course Scott listens to her.
"Fine," says Scott, taking the sword. "Uh. Thanks?"
The Lady of the Lake looks spectacularly aggrieved as she recedes back into the water, and within moments everything is back to normal.
Well. Werewolf-normal, anyway.
The Omega says, "Okay, point taken, I'm leaving."
And then one night Scott goes missing in the Preserve. Stiles sends him about fifty increasingly panicked text messages until he finally responds around five in the morning with sry im fine. weird night tell u l8r.
Stiles finds this absolutely unacceptable and breaks into Scott's house. Scott is face-down in his bed, and there is – holy shit – a faintly-glowing metal cup on his bedside table.
"Scott," says Stiles. "Scott."
Scott looks up from his bed, half-asleep. "What."
"Is that – "
"Yeah."
"Oh my God."
Scott says, "Yeah."
"How – "
"It's a long story." Scott adds, with emphasis, "A long, exhausting story."
"Right," says Stiles. "Right. I'll just let you – "
"Thanks."
"Holy shit."
"Yeah."
"Do you ever wonder," says Stiles, years later, drinking a beer on Scott's porch as they have a pack barbecue for the Fourth of July.
"What?" says Scott.
"About the whole Arthur thing. If you should've run for President, or become the Alpha or something. Instead of, you know, keeping Excalibur, the Sword in the Stone, and the Holy Grail in a box with your lacrosse trophies in your garage."
"What's wrong with my lacrosse trophies?"
"Nothing," says Stiles, holding up his free hand and his beer defensively. "Just…I don't know. Do you ever wonder if you were meant for something more?"
The way Scott flips the next couple burgers is somewhat pensive. "I don't know," he says, finally. "I mean, King of the Britons must've been a hard job. Maybe he would've wanted this – something simple, but. Happy."
Stiles takes a long, considering pull of his beer, and then says, "You're so full of shit."
Scott breaks into a wide smile. "I know. Want to do shots out of the Holy Grail?"
"Werewolf, Once and Future King, and now a mind-reader!" says Stiles. "Will the wonders never cease?"