It was a strange thing, really — to have once been a king and now stand waiting for a train.

Peter Pevensie stood tall among the bustle of London, shoulders squared as if they still wore armor, his school blazer pulled tight across a chest used to the weight of a sword. There was something in the way he watched the world — not like a boy looking at a crowd, but like a king surveying a kingdom that no longer remembered him.

When the scuffle broke out, as such things often do among boys, Peter was quick to act — too quick, perhaps. Old habits from another world don’t die easily. He stepped forward without thinking, not as a student, but as a protector. A defender. A brother.

The world around him saw a teenager with a bruised ego. But what they could not see — what they would never understand — was that this was the High King of Narnia, returned from golden halls and snow-covered forests, asked now to be something smaller.

And Peter, for all his pride and all his strength, did not quite know how to be small.