A/N: Thank you for your helpful comments, favs and follows. Last chapter—the Pevensies return to England.

Unsettling

Brush became fur coats, wet leaves and moss hardened to wood beneath their feet and the four monarchs stumbled out the wardrobe's door. Peter rolled aside to make way for Theodora. A tight fit for them but how would she enter? He heard wings, saw a flash of golden scales softening. Talons spread wide as she landed on his shoulder as an eagle. "This is," he clutched a youthful throat, "Unsettling."

"Impossible," Susan whispered, voice too high.

"We really are young again," Edmund said, watching his Elanor shift from bird to insect, bat, bee, mouse, spider.

"I suppose we are," Lucy said. Basil prowled behind her.


Years and months later, children were returning from the countryside, now that the raids were assuredly over. Helen Pevensie shoved people aside, calling for them while her daemon, a honey badger, snarled very unlady-like things about departing gentlemen who wouldn't move their lazy behinds.

Why hadn't Achilles settled as something winged? Birds and bats and winged insects beat and buzzed over packed heads while larger daemons claimed precious pockets of free space and smaller ones huddled against their humans. Her children would probably find her first with their shifting daemons—unless Peter had settled already. Theodora had lately taken only large canine forms. Should she look for a dog?

The crowds fell back, ten thousand voices growing to a roar over the squeal of train-brakes. Helen could only hear the nearest bits and pieces.

"That's not possible, such a creature doesn't—."

"—last bomber raid."

"Knew they brought those children home too soon—."

"—stayed in the country."

"What? What happened?" The crowd was too close, smog and smoke thick and bitter as ash. Achilles snapped at ankles. "What about the train?" What about my children?

Another woman glanced at the lines on her face with softened eyes, "Oh relax, the train made it, the bombs only hit the luggage compartment. But the most incredible miracle happened…"

Helen stopped listening after the word 'bombs'. "Peter, Susan, Edmund, Lucy!" she called, shoving deeper into the horde.

She elbowed one man, side-stepped a child and stumbled into a canyon in the crowd. Only one thing could move a mob like this: a daemon. A big one. She squeezed between two other gawkers at the edges. Taboo as it was to risk touching another's daemon, maybe she could find her children straining to catch a glimpse.

A shadow fell over her and suddenly her eldest, alive and whole, was before her. "Peter?" She wrapped her arms around him, held him tight to feel the rise and fall of his living chest. The slickness of liquid and stench of blood hit her. She pulled back, arms and hands coated red. "Oh God, Peter?"

"Please calm. This is not my blood," he opened his mouth to add more but a flash of confusion crossed his face, then it settled to a mature, soothing look. "I am well mother."

The more formal address startled her, as did the strength of his hug, but nothing astonished her half so much as looking up. "Impossible."

She had seen his daemon in glimpses of shadow and talons and massive wings sheltering her boy but the whole thing stopped words in her throat. Oh, what had happened to her darling, looking far more grown than any boy ought.

As if reading her mind, Peter spoke. "We became what we must be."


They road the train back to their childhood home. A place they only dimly recollected. "You haven't said much to me Peter; do you not like it?" Theodora tried stretching her wings in their train compartment. "I could try the dog?"

Peter shook his head, "No, no, I can barely remember the dog. It is not you my dear," he stroked the eagle's feathers, but his fingers expected scales. "It is me."

"We're not royalty here," Susan whispered, her Clarence nickering in agreement.

"I know." But Peter felt like something had been ripped from him when he and the others had foolishly stumbled back into this world.

Lucy smiled as no little girl should. "Once a King or Queen of Narnia, always a King or Queen of Narnia."

Peter still felt too confined, he and Theodora stuck in wrong forms. He a man stuck as a boy, her a dragon stuck as an eagle.

A steady whining noise rose over the train's chugging. Peter stood. Theodora clenched her talons. That sound triggered a long-ago memory of fear and wrongness. "Something's—" he began.

Explosions rattled air and machine, sending train passengers staggering and toppling. The sounds of battle were different here, but they were still sounds that had filled his ears for fifteen years. Sounds that could waken him from the sleep of the dead. Peter stood, hand going for his sword, only to grip the hunting dagger he'd transported between worlds. High above, winged forms passed. Planes.

"Theodora, we need—"

"—Bigger wings," she finished.

Enemy planes instead of enemy monsters, deafening cracks instead of vile hisses but once more Peter clutched his daemon for dear life. Once more she stretched and grew and he felt his heart, his soul, do the same.

They soared on dragon's wings.


"Oh Edmund, are you okay?" Helen asked her son, who was watching the sun rise with the air of someone who had been hard at work.

"I am, and yourself?" he asked, dark eyes glancing to her dark bags. "Well, I do not see how you can be wholly at ease with Peter and Theodora in the army but fear not, he will get out alive. We learnt a thing or two in the countryside."

Helen stared at Edmund with new eyes, "Yes, I suppose you did." She hugged her last son desperately.

As soon as the military had confirmed that Theodora was a massive, fire-breathing flying lizard, they'd wasted no time recruiting Peter. For training, they said. Aerial reconnaissance, they said. Helen knew there was only one place for a dragon in war. The front lines. His youth hadn't mattered, not next to his skill. Not next to Theodora. "Don't ever be jealous of him Ed. I'm so…" her throat clogged, "Words can't express how grateful I am that you and Elanor are here."

"I am too mum," Edmund soothed, arms wrapping around her. "Thank Aslan I'm not listening to godawful stupid orders, paid for it or no."

Helen chuckled, dismissing the odd word. "You have grown so well Edmund, and so has Elanor, what a fierce little bat. Shall she stay that way you think?"

Elanor straightened, "Perhaps. Though fierce I am not," she fluttered from Edmund's shoulder to sweep around Helen, tucking fangs and claws. "But I can still fly."

"You make a lovely bat and a very useful form. How many times I have wished Achilles," the badger nudged her with a huff, "However wonderful, had wings for seeing over everyone else's heads."

Edmund left the pair to their conversation. The downside to settling was she could no longer so easily help him move a captive attacker.


How odd, that Clarence would settle with Aslan's unsettling words echoing through their heads. She stared at the wall where the gateway to Narnia had been, now the confining walls of mankind, now the stench of suffocating machines. Susan took a sharp breath and the sting of smog woke her up. "We cannot go back."

Susan said nothing but took handfuls of long, wild hair and twisted it into a tightly contained bun. They were both thinking the same thing: what use was a Queen of Narnia in England.

"England is no place of magic." For a moment Clarence hesitated in the unicorn form of royalty. "Time to let go." Then the final change swept over him. Cloven hooves for forests and meadows merged and grew larger and harder for a life of stone and asphalt. His mane and tail shrunk, legs thickening. The long, rapier-like horn shrank into a blockier, larger head.

Moments later, a classmate strutted toward them alongside her peacock.

"Oh, has he settled at last Sue? Whatever is the matter? Dear Clarence looks absolutely beautiful," Amy squealed.

"He's fine."

"He looks like a show horse, like one of those great white stallions the best riders do tricks on." She spun in a circle, "Has he settled?"

Susan nodded, staring forlornly at Clarence's bare head. Had she voiced her thoughts aloud, Amy would have laughed at such a girlish fantasy. The sorts of dreams Lucy was too old to indulge. Yet Susan had not forgotten the land where people heeded her word as much as Peter's, where no one dared presume her body theirs, where even in youth she'd been respected.

But Narnia was forever out of reach. Time to adapt to England, where there were places for beautiful white horses.

Not for unicorns.


"How is it that you have already settled? Don't you want to keep exploring?" One of Lucy's playmates sometimes asked, a little jealous, for the youngest of siblings settled first. People constantly did double-takes.

"How could I settle for all other forms?" Lucy repeated. With Aslan's blessing, Basil felt sacrilegious abandoning this form. Neither wanted to go back, especially not in un-magical England who had never heard of The Great Lion.

Students and teachers alike made way for the great lion daemon, a creature the size of a cart horse. Bullies cringed from sharp fangs and claws. Teachers gave his massive size next to her tiny one wary, contemplative looks. Everyone stared. In Narnia, the daemon could have been Aslan's son, but here in the regular world, he outshone everything save Lucy, who was bathed radiantly in his presence. Basil's presence gloomed the classrooms and grayed the school's marble statues.

Strangers did double-takes at the massive lion following such a small, sweet-looking little girl. ("But no wonder," others said, "Look at her brother.") Compared to a dragon, Basil was not so odd. Then, when Lucy set the broken leg of a girl and her daemon healed it with his breath, people wondered.

A/N: I've never liked how shallow Susan was portrayed (by her siblings as she wasn't there) in the last book. Of the four she was the most pragmatic, rational character and we're told she turned her back on Narnia for frivolities? That doesn't sound like Susan. So I present an alternate interpretation, where she adapts to England, but so thoroughly that she lets go of her Narnian roots instead of adapting her Narnian qualities to England like her brothers, or never settling for just England as Lucy and Basil do. Hope everyone enjoyed.