𝐋𝐄𝐆𝐄𝐍𝐃𝐀𝐑𝐘 || peter pevensie [3]

epilogue

"So...Maria?"

"Nimueh was the name given to me by the Dryads when I first came to Narnia, but my parents named me Maria. I'm sorry I didn't tell you."

The two of them sat under an apple tree, Maria with her hands outstretched to watch the leaf-filtered light dance over her skin, Peter cutting up the fruit with a little knife and passing her pieces every once in a while. When she said this, he ceased in his work.

"Don't be sorry," he said, handing her another piece of fruit.

"When I was in Narnia, I didn't want to think about my life back on the Island. Not that I had much of a life there. Narnia always felt like my real home."

"You don't need to explain yourself."

"But I want to. In the end, the place I came from turned out to be very important to me."

Maria plucked a flower from the grass next to her, another immediately growing in its place, and began weaving several of them together.

"Your parents are..." Peter started.

"Not what you expected?"

"They're just so...young. I mean, I know Caspian and the Professor and Polly, they're all younger now than they were when they passed. But your parents don't look any older than you are."

"They died very young, when I was just a few years old. I don't remember much about them, but I knew what they looked like from the Little Screens in the orphanage."

"Little Screens?" Peter looked down at her, eyebrows raised.

Maria struggled, biting the inside of her lip, unable to think of anything Narnian to compare it to. "It's sort of like a...plate of glass. You can look at," she scrunched up her nose, "paintings of moments, but they aren't paintings. They're...snapshots of what was happening the second they were...taken."

"Oh, like a photograph?"

"Yes, I suppose." Maria had no idea what a photograph was but contented herself with the knowledge that whatever conclusion he came to from her jumbled explanation must mean something to him.

"How did it happen, for you?" Peter asked hesitantly.

Maria hummed in confusion.

Peter seemed to struggle in finding the words. "How did you...die?"

"Execution. For inciting riots amongst the People and challenging the authority of the Elites." She smiled. "Just like my parents. That's why we look about the same age." Maria looked up at Peter, also hesitant to ask how it had happened for him. Though she knew it was all over now, that wouldn't make hearing that he had suffered any easier. "What about you?"

"A train crash."

Maria's breath caught in her throat and she laid a gentle hand on Peter's arm. She wasn't entirely sure what a train was either, but the word crash held such violence that her heart gave an almighty squeeze. Setting down his tools, Peter took her hand and kissed her on the forehead.

"It was quick," he said against her skin. "We didn't see it coming and suddenly it was over. Edmund, Lucy and I were waiting on the platform. An apparition of sorts had appeared to us, Tirian – you've met him – asking for our help. Only Eustace and Jill were young enough to go back to Narnia, but we were all going to gather before they travelled there. There must have been something wrong with the tracks because everything seemed louder than it usually was."

Maria expected him to say something more, but he didn't. Then, she remembered what had passed through her mind between her execution and waking up on the shores of the lake; the rattling of rust-bitten rails, trembling something terrible. She wondered if this was what Peter meant by tracks, that she had seen the platform where the Pevensies had stood, blissfully unaware of their imminent fate.

"What are we to do now?" she asked. "There are no foes to face, no wars to fight, no alliances to make. It seems as if that was all we ever knew of each other."

"We do all things we couldn't do because of that. You could tell me more about your Island, and I could get to know your parents."

"And you could tell me about yours," Maria chirped, curling her legs up underneath her and turning herself towards him. "And about everything you've been doing since I last saw you."

"We could finally get married...if that's still something you want?"

"Yes," Maria smiled, tracing her thumb over the orange gems on her ring. "I'd like that very much." Finishing the work in her lap, knotting the stems of the last flowers together, and lifted one of the two flower crowns to Peter's head. "There, one for you."

A smile broke out over his face. Peter took the second crown and placed it ceremoniously on Maria's curls, in an obvious gesture to when she had crowned him King of Narnia. "And one for you."

"Once a King and Queen of Narnia," Maria said.

Peter brought her knuckles to his lips and kissed them. "Always a King and Queen."