An Archive of Our Own, a project of the Organization for Transformative Works
It’s Favourite Minor Character day so naturally, I had to write something for Norrie. I absolutely adore her, and I’ve got all my fingers crossed we get to see more of her!
Click through or read below!
Norrie White lived in a tiny country town, and she hated it.
It was too small. Everybody knew everybody, and if for some reason you didn’t know somebody, you knew someone else who did. There was one school. One church. One pub. Two each of the grocery stores and takeaways, always on the verge of forcing each other out of business.
With so little around, Norrie was always told she couldn’t afford to be picky about what she wanted. That went for everything – what she wore, what she ate, who she spent her time with. But even when she was very young, Norrie thought this was stupid. Just because her parents had shitty friends and ate the same thing five nights a week didn’t mean she had to do the same.
She spent her allowance on fish and chips, and spent her time with the only boy on town who didn’t make her want to bang her head against a wall.
Paul was charming and whip-sharp, more clever than his stupid haircut would have you think. When Norrie decided he was her friend, he took to the role with pride. He did ask her out once, when they were twelve, and they dated for all of three weeks before Norrie concluded she didn’t like boys. Paul had only shrugged; he hadn’t enjoyed dating either, and if he didn’t like dating his best friend, then why bother at all?
They both had Talent, and that particular traumatic quirk that had made them friends also landed them both positions at Jacobs&Co. in the same year. Norrie got hired first, her parents hustling in the same day the local paper announced an operative had died on a case the night before. She spent three lonely months learning how to make salt bombs and polish chains and swing a rapier, while Paul tackled his maths homework by himself for the first time in two years. But soon enough another kid died, and Paul was back to filling Norrie’s ear with conspiracy theories about the Problem.
The job wasn’t good. It was one thing to see Visitors now and then, at a distance. It was another to actively pursue them on a weekly basis. But at least it was something. For Norrie, it was a first step. Get her qualifications, build her skills, and she could take her certificates and piss off somewhere else, leave this shitty town behind. Everywhere needed agents; she’d be able to go anywhere she wanted.
Her parents didn’t think much of her long-term plans. They either didn’t believe she’d actually achieve them, or they didn’t care. They were nice enough, really, they just didn’t have the energy to spare to properly afford Norrie any kind of affection. She was the oldest of four, and with the others being a set of pre-teen triplets, she was never her parents’ priority. But her mother was still perfectly happy to take majority of her wages and go across to the next town, where they had a tanning salon and a halfway decent manicurist. Her dad just went to the pub on payday, like most of the other men in the town. Norrie herself was usually afforded enough of her own earnings to go down to the corner store and buy a small paper bag’s worth of humbugs, which she would tuck into a pouch on her workbelt between the matches and the lavender water, and would secretly snack on when Jacobs turned his back.
The town square was between her house and the Jacobs&Co. office, so every evening she had to walk past the ugly stone monolith that formed the heart of the town. At sunset the light caught on the bronze plaques that decorated three of its four sides, and the thing became a sickly beacon; fifty years of dead children, their names glinting in the fading light. Norrie always took care to stay out of its shadow when she passed by.
Norrie had seen two kids die by the time Lucy joined Jacobs&Co., and her first thought when Jacobs walked her into the room was ‘God, she’s going to be the third.’ More than any Spectre or Wraith, that thought haunted her as the years passed; as she and Lucy grew closer, and closer, and Norrie realised how badly her heart would break if Lucy did become that unlucky third. It used to keep her up during the day, when she was trying to sleep after a night of ghosts and salt and iron.
She didn’t realise she needn’t have worried.
She didn’t realise she ought to worry more about herself.
She didn’t realise until it was far, far too late.
