history × she's the four minute warning, she is hell to pay
When Anderson Blakely first meets Enfys Keel, he's nineteen and she's fourteen and she waits until he's sitting down already to sit so as she's above him. By this point it is obviously too late to move lest it look like his poor still-teenaged masculinity can't cope with a fourteen year old pretending she's bigger than he is, and by the way she smirks at him (sharp as a tack in that terrifying way where one can't be sure whether she'll flourish or walk into traffic) that was no accident. He decides not to talk to her, because she's a child and he's basically a man, and not only do they have really ugly words for that but she's also kind of a bitch. He can just tell.
He kisses her when she's fifteen, but it would be more accurate to say that she kisses him. (The first time.) He's still honestly a little concerned that one day she'll walk into traffic just to see what happens, but figures philosophically that he can better prevent that by keeping an eye on her. It can't hurt. Well, actually, it can, because there are these things called 'statutory rape laws' and she's still a year shy of the age of consent; when she realizes he's 'nobly holding back his manly urges' (her words- what the fuck is wrong with her and what the hell has she been reading), she badgers him about it for a while. He thinks it's more to entertain herself at his expense than because she genuinely wants to pressure him into breaking the law in her pants; at this point he's not totally sure what's actually going on here, because he doesn't think he ever actually decided to be cautiously dating a completely insane teenager. It feels like something that just sort of happened to him.
Blakely the Elder (as she persists in referring to his father, with whom she will never get along) doesn't see it precisely that way, and some of the nasty words for men who get a little too close to children get aired out around the house. A lot, actually, and Anderson wearies of the fact that his girlfriend is like a greyhound with attitude that the entire world seems convinced he's taking advantage of. Except her father, who seems more concerned she's going to break his spirit.
This is not the vote of confidence he was looking for, although it makes him laugh a little wryly and remember why he likes her so much. It's annoying as hell when she takes the work he's doing under his father (you won't become a Watcher if you don't study) and corrects it and, adding insult to injury, turns out to be in the right, and it drives him crazy that she writes in the margins of her books, and he hates how every time he turns around she's drawing a picture of him, and he wouldn't trade it for anything in the world when she sits on his lap and grabs his ears with both hands and declares earnestly that when she steals his job from him, she will generously support him as a trophy husband.
They sleep together when she's sixteen, and he isn't actually fucked up enough to think that that has anything to do with why it's the same year that her mother dies, but he holds her when she won't cry and won't even shake- she's numb against him and he promises to call and to write, and he doesn't. He's ashamed of himself - he listens to the increasingly fewer and further between messages she leaves and probably deserves it when she calls him a dickless wanker (oxymoron, he notes dispassionately) who isn't enough of a man to abandon her to her face - but she'd gone quiet against him in a way that he'd never seen and he'd been...afraid. Enfys had been his constant, his north star steamrolling the way with terror and dissent and really terrible jokes, knife-edged already and it had been hard to think of her as young. Only then she had been, small and hurting and he'd forgotten, almost, that she was so young until the blood she never had to see washed away everything else.
And he still sort of loved her, only it was the first time he'd ever really felt wrong to, and he'd been so afraid she'd never be the bright, bright blade that he'd cut his fingers on over and over again.
(In 2003, Blakely the Elder is killed by Bringers and Anderson stumbles, blindly, through words until she says, mercifully, I know, love, I hit a guy in a bar and he went all the fucking way through it, I know and he is absolutely certain that it's her he's missing and not some teenager fetish, but she tells him to go take care of his mum and not to worry and then she hangs up. In a way she does still manage to steal his job, but he doesn't want it any more, so he can probably live with not being a trophy husband.)