Rebellious teen!Keith is so cute, I want to pinch his cheeks and get him a therapist. Do you think Keith and Lotor would get along if they were both teenagers, or do you think their personalities and ideals wouldāve clashed too much?
āI wanna pinch his cheeks and get him a therapistāĀ anon, when I tell you I screamed-
But actually, yes, I do think they would still have liked one another as teens! Ultimately, your personality as a teen (and even as a child) remains pretty much unchanged; your likes / dislikes / thoughts / feelings / opinions will (and often should!) change as you grow and learn more about the world around you, and just people in general, but who you are at your core reallyā¦ doesnāt. Iāve worked with large groups of little kids intermittently in the past, and trust me, they may be small, but theyāre still fully formed people by likeā¦ 5 or 6. Just more volatile people with a very restricted world view.
So this would absolutely hold true for both Keith and Lotor.
Hypothetically, letās say they meet because teen!Lotor (~16) is in exile on the primitive backwater planet of Dirt, and teen!Keith (~14) is rocking around foster care with the label of āproblem childā having been slapped on his cheek for the last few years. Bearing in mind that this is pre-Shiro, Keith is made up entirely of sharp edges and a temper he canāt rein in, while Lotor is cold and bitter and completely isolated from everything heās ever knownā¦ and then they find each other. Itās not easy at first because of course itās not: neither know how to trust, not any more, and both have forgotten all the reasons they ever knew for why anyone would want to keep them around outside of some ulterior motive.
Until Lotor rounds a corner and sees some little spitfire holding his own against three human brats, all larger than he is and with a meanness in their eyes, and thinks he finds something familiar in the feral creature that tears into his aggressors with blunt little teeth. Heās not Galra, he canāt be, but if ever there was anyone on this primeval rock that was, itād be him, so Lotor goes out of his way to interfere: clumsy malice really canāt hold a candle to Imperial training, and so the oafs fall to him. He tells the boy that heās welcome only to be quite eloquently informed that he should have āminded his own fucking businessā and that his dark-haired companion ādidnāt need savingā especially by some āhero-type whoās gonna get himself killed.ā
Lotor calls him an ungrateful little shit, and is told in return that if he thinks people have some sort of an obligation to him for help they never asked for, then heās exactly as entitled as he looks.
So no, it doesnāt start off well, and itās not always easy, but finds himself fixated on the kid to the point that when they next just-so-happen to cross paths (and, okay, so itās not quite so coincidental as all that) Lotor canāt help himself but to provoke Keith just enough to feel the heat of that fire again, and somehow this leads to them physically fighting one another this time, and itāsā¦ itās so similar to Galra bonding that something Lotor didnāt even know he was missing seems to blossom within his throat, and he almost-
Keith trills - not Lotor! - and then withdraws so sharply that he stumbles, falls backwards, and were this a real fight Lotor would finish him immediately. But itās not, so he doesnāt, and instead just blinks at the boy who has slapped his hand over his mouth with such brutality that heāll almost certainly have bruised himself, because that was a Galra cry.
Speaking of crying, Keith looks like he might, and itās the kind of horror that Lotor recognises as one conditioned from years of understanding what is simply unacceptable. Slowly he kneels before Keith, eyes him carefully, and before the boy can run (as he seems very close to doing) Lotor offers a questioning trill in return. Great dark eyes widen at the sound, another muffled peep surging forth, unbidden, in response, and it takes time, but slowly over the next few weeks, Keith comes around, and opens up to Lotor about his temper, his strange habits, the things heās learnt about himself that are better kept at a distance from others because heās never been able to fit in with the other kids the way heās supposed to, and doesnāt know what heās done wrong until itās too late. Lotor shares fractions of his own life in return - omitting the obvious - but itās not until Keith shares with his his knife that Lotor can be sure, because thatās luxite, and hardly anyone has such a fine blade, least of all forged from the ore of Daibazaalās own moons.
So itās like this that Keith comes to learn about his past, and Lotor sees in him a future.
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