Alright, Kat, I need to know if there is a specific word or phrase that has incredibly high chances of getting each of LS's boys GOING 💥
BAELOR — "my prince."
Yes, I know. You thought I'd pick something clever. I'm not going to pick something clever. It's my prince and it's devastating and it works every single time because of exactly who he is. Baelor is the Breakspear. Baelor is the realm's. Baelor is everyone's and has been since the day he was born. His father's heir, his mother's pride, the kingdom's future. The word "prince" is public property; it belongs to councils and courtiers and commoners shouting his name at tourneys. My prince is the possessive that nobody else in the Seven Kingdoms is permitted to use. And when you say it (low, at his throat, fingers in his hair, my prince) you are reaching past the title, past the crown he hasn't even inherited yet, and claiming the man underneath the inheritance. He goes still every time. Every single time. It doesn't wear off. The hand on your waist tightens, his mouth finds your pulse, and whatever patience he walked into the room with leaves the building in a blink. Say it again.
MAEKAR — "good."
That's it. That's the word. One syllable. No embellishment. You, looking at something he's done (anything, any small competent Maekar thing, tightening a girth strap, passing you the salt, whatever) and saying good in that quiet absent northern way you have, the way you'd say it to a well-trained horse, the way you'd say it to a capable man who has done what was required of him. He will pretend he did not hear you. His jaw will clench. His ears will go red. And later, when you're alone, he will try to find a way to engineer you saying it again without having to admit that's what he's doing. Maekar has spent his entire life being not quite enough (not the heir, not the favourite, not the one anyone picks first) and you handing him a single word of plain approval, in the voice he trusts most in the world, undoes him in a way the filthiest declaration never could. Bonus points if you say it when he's between your thighs. He will lose any semblance of self control real quick. He won't speak for the rest of the night but you'll wake up with finger-bruises on your hips the following day from him holding you down.
AERION — "there's my good boy." && "my Aerion."
Two phrases for him because he's the one who needs two. One for owning, one for being owned. He needs both from you. He's dangerous. He's mad. He is, by every external measure, the most volatile person either of you know, and he is absolutely, ruinously, unsurvivably in love with you. In canon!HW you're forbidden, you keep him at arm's length with that polite imperial distance of a woman who has already been claimed by his uncle or by duty itself so the wanting has nowhere to go, and it calcifies into this permanent low-grade fever that he walks around with constantly. He's always five minutes from doing something he can't come back from. You know it. He knows it. Everyone at court knows it. That's the whole dynamic.
So the two phrases work in tandem, and they work on opposite wounds.
"There's my good boy" (drawled, slightly amused, the way you'd reward a clever hound for behaving) is the one that handles him. It's the leash. It's the word that says I see you performing for me, I see the tantrum you're having, and I have chosen, graciously, to reward you instead of punishing you. Aerion has never in his life been handled by anyone who could actually manage it. His father's idea of control is cold disapproval. His brothers' fear him. Yours is amusement or cold discipline he cannot break, and that's the part that gets under his skin, that make shim bare his teeth. Because it means you're not afraid of him. It means you have already calculated every dangerous thing he could do and decided he isn't one of them, not to you. He'll scowl. He'll sulk, he'll act out. He'll say something cutting. His pupils will blow. And then he'll do whatever demented thing it takes to earn it again. He'll behave at dinner, stop tormenting some courtier, bring you the head of a man who looked at you wrong, he doesn't care, he'll do any of it. That's him letting you own him.
But "my Aerion" is the one that ruins him. That's the one he can't defend against. Because the entire problem of being him is that he's never in his life been anyone's (not really, not the way he wants). Second son to a fourth son, his mother dead, his father cold, his siblings a nuisance, constantly chafing against the thought that his destiny has been stolen from him. He owns everything and belongs to no one. And you, who hold him at arm's length by necessity, who cannot and will not claim him in daylight, who smile past him at feasts and dance with other men and call him nephew in front of the whole court—when you say my Aerion, quietly, in a moment you've stolen, behind a door, with your hand flat against his chest—you are giving him the single thing he is not allowed to have. The forbidden thing. The possessive he cannot wear in public even if it's not the shape he wants. The proof, whispered and private and yours, that despite everything (despite his uncle, despite the vows, despite the rules of gods and me) he is still, somewhere underneath all of it, yours.
He wants to own you so completely that no other man could ever touch you again. But underneath that, deeper than that, more dangerous than that he wants to belong to you. He wants to be claimed. He wants to put his head in your lap and hear you say my Aerion and know that somewhere in the world, in a language only you two speak, he is not alone.
