Fandom : merlin (bbc)
Title :
three tasks Author :
syllicRating : teen
Characters & Pairings : arthur/merlin. season 1 uther, gaius, morgana, and gwen feature heavily, as well as various suitors.
Length : 30,600
Warnings : none
Summary : Arthur is the Royal Arbiter for Suitable Suitors' Disputes. He (and his trusty companion, the golden-dragon-tasselled hat) alone can determine who is fit to woo royal servants and other assorted courtiers in Uther's court.
My Rave Review : naive manservants, doltish princes, dashing adventures! arthur is the hbic of dealing with the complicated love lives of camelot's court, making sure that an incident like the one involving the goat is never repeated again. okay, i was trying to start this off by saying the premise isn't as cracky as the summary would have you believe, that instead, the fic is darling, this fic is sweet, the fic is everything i want in a courtship fic because the whole premise is courtship and this fic made me realize that i wanted a courtship fic, a want i didn't know i had.
this fic also has morgana and gwen being girly friends at the window, uther being a good father (even when he's not there!), and gaius's eyebrows of doom. and i love especially that there's a good amount of pining done. there's also so much heart in this fic, it's breathtaking. for example, arthur's speech as he finishes an arbitration, which stuck in my head for the last, what, two years? since i've read it:
“We are all fools for love. And when we love truly, nothing seems too foolish to us, for we are convinced that all foolish things done in the name of love are anything but foolish.[...] And though we may see, with hindsight, that a foolish thing would not have been so terrible to do after all, when we are ready to love fully, we know at once that we will do what is necessary for the people we love, no matter how foolish, not because we can but because we must."
fists in the air, hearts for eyes, seal-clapping, all that.