#oc: thaston

[lavampira]

filled out this template for the messy rivals-to-enemies-with-benefits relationship between thaston and hunter in my swtor canon <:

[visionmarred-archive]

8, 19, 42, or 48 + cas/thaston

thank you Dani! 🖤 always hoping I do your OCs justice when I borrow them

48. tending to your lover's wound, placing a kiss on top of their head, grateful they're still alive

---

After countless missions together, her steady hands working to mend the injuries on their hurting body had become something of a routine.

The shuttle they were currently using, autopilot marked towards a small port where they would discreetly leave it behind for a new one in the hopes of deterring any followers, wasn’t exactly equipped with the commodities that Casoleil would have liked, but it was fine. Her own portable medical kit (lower on supplies, now) had everything that she needed to fix the immediate problem, and there was a bottle of whiskey in a cupboard that would - in shared experience - relieve any lingering pain.

Not that Thaston was really the type to admit to being in pain, but working together as often as they had, Casoleil had learned to tell anyway. She figured they had both earned that bottle.

Things had gone sideways. The mission was still largely successful, thankfully, and both were still alive, but it had been a close call. The politician’s personal merc team had been almost lethally efficient in guarding their boss’s secrets, and when a blaster bolt had made its way to her partner’s torso, she knew it was time to leave while they still could. Luckily for them that they had procured the data they needed before they were discovered, she supposed, and luckier still that her flash bang grenades and stealth generator had given them the cover they needed to get away.

“Sorry, sweet thing,” Casoleil said gently when Thaston winced as the kolto spread across the burn on their torso. Their wound was rough to the touch, and she couldn’t help but think again of the shot that did this to them.

It was meant for her, but she wasn’t the one hurt, was she? Now that the immediate danger had passed, she couldn’t stop thinking about how Thaston had stepped in the way for her when they saw what was coming. Casoleil closed her eyes, an uncomfortable lump in her throat at the thought of it.

She could feel their eyes on her as she began wrapping gauze around their back and stomach, making sure it was snug and secure, but not uncomfortably tight. Casoleil’s hands lingered on their injury, and she finally looked up at their face.

Thaston was no worse for the wear, thankfully, and patient as they always were when she was tending them. They shifted closer to her as her hands traced their way up their chest, an arm wrapping around her waist and pulling her against them.

This would be the part in their routine where she’d make a quip at their bad luck, or where she’d make a flirtatious joke just to see that smile of theirs.

When she opens her mouth to make such a comment, something else comes out instead. “You scared me.”

She can feel them tense underneath her, and it feels like an unfair comment to make, but she can’t stop herself from continuing. “I really… I thought they’d gotten you.”

“It’s a good thing they were a poor shot, isn’t it?” They’re smirking as they say it, likely trying to ease her mood, but it doesn’t help like she hopes it will.

“I mean it. I...” She trailed off, biting her lip as she stopped herself from asking a question that rested on the tip of her tongue. I could have taken that hit. Why did you get in the way?

But with the way her heart is pounding, Casoleil isn’t sure she’s ready for what the answer could be.

“Casi.” A nickname that was really only acceptable from their lips, spoken in a soothing tone as if they weren’t the one that could’ve died if the shot had been aimed just a little differently. Their free hand tilted her chin to better see each other before it moved to caress her cheek, and she couldn’t help but sigh and lean into their touch. “Hey. I’m okay.”

“You almost weren’t,” Casoleil said quietly, shaking her head as Thaston lowered their hand again. She’s not even sure what she wants to say, but it feels like there’s more to be said.

Cupping their face in her hands, Casoleil leaned up as she dipped Thaston’s head within reach, pressing her lips to the top of their head and lingering for half a moment before she pulled back and looked them in the eye again.

Their arms are wrapped around her waist and pulling her in once more, head resting in the crook of her neck.

“I’m okay.” Thaston kissed her gently, Casoleil closing her eyes again. “I’m okay.” Another sweet kiss. “We’re okay.”

Letting out a breath she didn’t know she was holding, Casoleil just nodded slightly, letting herself relax and enjoy the feel of being in Thaston’s arms as she traced her fingers through their black hair. “I’m glad.”

It feels so much lately like there’s more to be said, but she doesn’t know how to say it. Kissing their hair once again, she hopes that speaking through actions as much as she can will suffice.

[autisticlaezel]

I saw this post and simply had to write a fic based on it. Thaston belongs to @lavampira

-

Luna takes in the scene before her, forcing herself to take a deep breath.

The table is messier than she'd prefer. The stack of cards–pile, really, is large enough that it's tipped over and descended into absolute chaos–mark the center of the table.

The half empty bottle of whiskey and empty bowl of snacks both support the appearance of a long, tiresome game between two brilliant strategic minds, and if that wasn't evidence enough, the sunset and its reflection in the giant sea that is Manaan will be.

It had been early afternoon when they started.

There are eight cards in her hand and only two in her opponent's. Not ideal, admittedly, but not a loss quite yet.

She tries to analyze them–it's difficult, their training is as good as hers is, they're both experts at keeping their cards close to their chest–metaphorically speaking, but literally in this situation, she supposes–and all they do is smirk at her. She's not sure if they're trying to undermine her confidence–make her make a mistake–or if they're genuinely about to win.

That's when they put down the card. Red, draw two. If Luna was the sort of person to use foul language, she would use some truly creative swears right now.

"Uno," their smirk grows wider, meaner, but there's an affectionate undertone to it as well. Familial love expressed through teasing and mutual antagonism. An odd friendship between two people who prefer their own company most of the time.

She grits her teeth, draws the two cursed cards and realizes to her own frustration that none of her ten cards are red, which really shouldn't be possible.

"I hate you," she hisses, glaring at her sibling in law with no actual malice, "with every inch of my being."

"That's not a lot of inches," Thaston replies without missing a beat, and she has to rely on her decades of field experience to stop herself from laughing.

"Come on, Luna. Your turn," they know she's got nothing. They've got to know that she's got nothing, so she passive aggressively draws yet another card while avoiding eye contact.

She cannot look at them as they put down their last card. Cannot stand the idea of the triumphant look in their eyes.

Cannot stop herself from smiling despite her loss, because she's actually having fun doing something so mundane as playing cards with her family.

She never thought this was something she would be allowed to have. This moment of normalcy, of safety, of being known without having to fear it being used against her, but right here in this moment, she knows she wouldn't trade it for anything in the galaxy.

[lavampira]

[lavampira]

the way thaston is becoming even more wary and unhinged through my agent story rewrite has been interesting but now that their canon changed so they’re not in a romantic relationship or married to ******** in their endgame anymore it actually makes so much more sense with their development and where their characterization is leading them in the current era too

[lavampira]

wip whenever ✨

I keep forgetting about all the wip wednesdays I got tagged in the last couple of weeks but I’ve been working on a pre-umbara scene from the traitor arc in swtor from kai’s pov !!

Theron arguing with the other agent isn’t unusual, but something about the rigid set to his shoulders while Thaston jabs a finger into his chest, snapping something that Kai can’t quite make out at this distance, and the fact that Theron barely returns more than a pointed look that seems odd. He twists away from them then, finally seeming to notice his partner in the entry. As he starts to move towards him, Kai looks at him more closely, noting the dark circles marking the beige skin beneath his eyes and the tired smile that he offers as he stops in front of him. It’s only when he glances behind Theron that he finds the Chiss watching him with an unreadable look in turn. “Everything okay?” Kai asks, flitting his gaze back to the man in front of him. “Same asshole, different day.” Theron folds his arms across his chest. “Nothing I can’t handle.” Unsure what else to say to that, Kai simply nods. He can’t shake the feeling that there’s something more to it, but he trusts that if it was something serious, Theron would tell him. They’ve been through enough these last few years to rely on each other, even though neither of them are used to relegating responsibility. But it doesn’t stop the tendrils of worry from taking root in his chest at all of the increasing signs of Theron’s stress. Kai runs a tattooed hand through his loose hair as he leans against the wall, attempting to appear relaxed despite knowing how the other man will see right through it. “You didn’t come to bed last night.” “I had to finish a few reports, but it was already late by the time I sent the last one,” Theron says with a half-hearted lift of his shoulder. “Figured it wasn’t worth waking you when I had an early meeting, too.” Wariness gives way to the cold grip of dread as Kai realizes then that he’s lying. For all the time that they’ve been sharing a room, Theron has never once woken him by coming and going from the bed. Why he’d make such an obvious lie, Kai doesn’t know, but it unsettles him almost as much as the fact that he’s lying to him at all. Swallowing hard around the lump forming in his throat, Kai decides not to confront it, not before he can understand why. “Did you get any sleep at least?” “I dozed off in my chair for a couple hours. Got a nasty pain in my neck for it, too. I don’t recommend trying it.” “Maybe you should leave a scathing review wherever we got all this furniture.” Theron laughs, making Kai’s chest ache more with the soft noise. “Maybe I will.”

[lavampira]

enemies ripping each other apart for all the ways that they’re mirrored mid spicy makeout sesh and despising the attraction that exists in spite of how much they loathe each other for being two halves of the same fucked up coin is something that can be so personal

[lavampira]

peak humor is thaston winning this roll every single time I run hammer with them :o)

[lavampira]

okay I’ve been jotting down some thoughts on my self-indulgent agent rewrite since it’s got such a death grip on my brain tonight

the main things I wanted to do with it are A) remove the star cabal because I’ve never been a fan of the third party influence/manipulation on the happenings in the galaxy since it takes away accountability for why the republic and empire have been at war, and B) alter the dynamic between hunter and thaston so that it isn’t uncomfortably triggery with mind control coercion and that they’re on a more even ground

SO with that being said

I’m thinking that hunter is still the one who tips ardun kothe off about the brainwashing in thaston’s head and the keyword like canon implies, but he doesn’t use it himself - he can still be his arrogant self and poke at them about Knowing it exists and goad them about both imp intelligence and the SIS while leaning into his ‘you’re the only one who can match me, I want to see what you can do’ sort of fascination with them by keeping the playing field even, and potentially a mutual hatefuck for funsies while having to cooperate, but it also shows how thaston’s influence affects him, too. by which I mean I’m imagining that hunter considers himself better than the SIS and pushes thaston to go rogue with him (‘you’re the only one who can keep up with me and our skills are wasted here’ -> “I behaved for the SIS. but for you and me? let’s be bad.”) as thaston breaks the restraints (and changing That One Line to hunter being more pleased they’re free of it to team up with him) and the war reignites, not unlike what happens with that part in game.

which leads into the bit of change I’m making with the third act that’s more about the breakdown of them as narrative foils - hunter going rogue from the SIS, thaston starting to defect from the empire - and their rivalry ramping up into a push-and-pull mutually destructive state where their differences in loyalties and personal vendettas cross. smth smth ‘you’re the only one who understands me’ / ‘I’m the only one who gets to kill you’ / ‘we could’ve had everything together’ vibes.

anyway I am totally thinking about this a normal amount and not at all falling deeper into obsession with the wasted potential of narrative foils as a corruptive force and toxic infatuation nope

[lavampira]

wip wednesday

hoth is going as well as expected AKA swan-diving into the goofypool with the agent rewrite [cw for a little blood and violence but in a homoerotic murder standoff sort of way]

Thaston strides across the entry and shoves him back against the bulkhead, their left hand gripping his jacket tight enough for their knuckles to pale and their other flicking open the knife from their own sleeve, pressing it to his throat as they crowd in close to him. Hunter has to look up at them from this angle, his green eyes glimmering with the faintest spark of anger despite the arrogant smirk still pulling at his lips. It spreads into a sharp grin as the barrel of one of his blasters presses into Thaston’s stomach and they still.

“Is that any way to thank me for coming all this way to personally extract you?” Hunter asks, wincing as the blade bites into his skin with his movement just enough for a bead of red to trickle down his pale throat. The safety switch whirs as he jabs the blaster harder into their gut. “Hands off.”

Holding his gaze, Thaston lingers for a few seconds on principle, almost daring him to pull the trigger. Hunter’s brow pinches in his annoyance. He opens his mouth to say something else, his eyes briefly flitting to their lips before meeting their red eyes again, but Thaston lowers the knife and pushes back a step, and his mouth snaps shut again as he stumbles with the sudden lack of support.

“Satisfied?” Hunter asks, slipping his blaster into the back of his trousers.

Thaston scoffs. “Hardly.”

“Too bad.” His shoulder slams into them on his way to the pilot’s seat, forcing a pained hiss to escape them, and they catch that infuriating smirk tugging at his features again as he passes. “Get your game face on, Legate. We’ll reach your new friends soon.”

[lavampira]

ngl this will make little sense out of context from vicious and vengeful but I’d actually be able to tolerate the agent vs h*nter rivalry if it was written more like the dynamic between victor and eli in that series

and I’m a whole clown lowkey tempted to rewrite acts 2 + 3 with thaston if I have the brainspace to delve into it sometime :o)

[lavampira]

"spy?? hitman?? sad" this one intrigues me the most i think

ask me about a wip

a little more summarized in context of the game here but tldr basically a 'trained spy-slash-glorified-assassin is falling apart in their newfound freedom from mind control without an employer' analysis

[cw for intrusive thoughts of descriptive violence]

[lavampira]

thaston said it was their turn for a new outfit 🖤

[lavampira]

I had a burst of writing motivation so I was working on the ongoing sniper siblings character study but uhhhhh realizing how feral and unhinged thaston actually gets post-hoth during the class story hit me like a brick to the face after this one scene

[lavampira]

thinking about the traitor arc since I’m replaying it with kai soon, and I’m still not entirely sure how I’m adjusting the plot so it isn’t utterly ridiculous because I still loathe how disjointed iokath feels, everything about the machine gods, and how the zildrog plot falls flat in execution anyway, but as far as tweaking some details goes, I’m pretty sure thaston will be just as involved in it as theron behind the scenes, and since theron was thaston’s SIS handler post-vanilla in my canon, they’d be able to get the ‘we’re being spied on’ message across (something similar to that scene in fmab of riza telling mustang about salim bradley) in their own form of code and copero would make much more sense with thaston involved rather than theron nosing his way into chiss house politics to get an in on the superweapon map or whatever. and the two of them planning this out with theron going behind kai’s back for secrecy is painful, but it would put thaston’s whole issue about theron ‘compromising what needs to be done’ because of his relationship with the commander behind them.

[lavampira]

feeling like that unsolved connected the dots meme about my SOR canon tonight but I finally got around to wrapping up the expansion with thaston so I’ve been reworking some details. rambling under a cut for length.

thaston goes through SIS-required therapy to clear them for missions and obtains a new handler prior to reconnecting with the empire to officially act as a double agent sometime before the makeb op. not entirely sure if the timing pans out because I’ve never read the comics or annihilation, but I’m thinking that theron is their new handler, especially since imo ardun kothe shouldn’t be allowed to continue that task with them and theron is a far better handler than a field agent. that connection allows them to still be involved in the background for certain missions in the whole plotline like ziost where they’ve been tasked.

and the reason for that is because andan gets named sith intelligence commander - he actually has the better disposition and reputation for it than cipher nine does, and whether he likes it or not, he does benefit from the weight of his sith family name even if he isn’t sith himself - so he replaces lemon banana as the imperial contact working alongside theron and kai with the revanite conspiracy. actually makes more sense with a loyal imperial and former agent looking into things than a sith who barely learned how to slice two days ago.

even though ana maite isn’t directly involved with the revanites ordeal, she does get wind of the hand tracking her movements and starts investigating them and the imperial guard herself. the dark council (who already see oricon as her fault for freeing the dread masters, as well as suspect she’s a fanatical loyalist to the emperor, despite that not being true) come down on ana maite as a scapegoat after vitiate’s revival on yavin, further believing that she continues to help the emperor rather than stop him.

cadrien (the wrath’s former apprentice, now a sith lord) gets the ‘punish the apprentice for the master’s mistakes’ treatment (i.e. similar to how cytharat did with the makeb mission after malgus’ attempted coup) by shoving him into the role of minister of intelligence. it fits his personality anyway, considering that he learned from ana maite’s nosy paranoia and suspicion that she in turn had learned from baras having a network of spies and his hands in intelligence, and how he operates with similar tactics and manipulation. and it still meshes with the dark council stupidly reforming intelligence under sith control.

and then ziost happens as I’d originally planned: thaston replaces kovach as the imperial agent tasked with investigating vitiate’s presence on ziost, but remains theron’s SIS agent as well, while ana maite and kai work together to confront vitiate as the (former) wrath and the battlemaster. cadrien and andan deal with their respective roles in handling the crisis from the citadel on kaas. ana maite’s taunting broadcast to vitiate is played across the holonet imstead of just new adasta, publicly revealing her as the wrath for the first time; the devastation of ziost feels like a personal punishment (i.e. destroying her homeworld) from vitiate for defying him, but the dark council takes it as the last straw in a series of the wrath failing to stop the emperor, so ana maite flees the empire not long afterward to escape the backlash and start laying the foundation for the network that becomes the alliance formed when kai is “publicly killed” by arcann / frozen in carbonite.