THE MANCHURIAN PRINCE

He never intended for it to get this bad, but here he was, the villain prince of the United Kingdom.

The central trouble for Harry had always been that he had found himself caught in a schism between honouring the past which for him was mostly tarnished with trauma (or at least that's what his therapist had explained to him) and embracing a silicon future which could make everything new again: a world like Oz where everything would be rainbows and unicorns and the promise of power would be on his own terms and not through the constitiuonal strait jacket of a thousand year old monarchy.

Already in the 21st century, an insidious rift had developed between global corporations and ye olde institutions, including sovereign governments and monarchies. Harry, like his wife Meghan, found himself increasingly drawn to the allure of corporate power where the likes of Amazon, Apple and Netflix could hold more sway with public opinion than royalty it seemed. He genuinely considered himself ahead of the curve, an ambassador for progressive modernity, not just another sweaty gammon being slow cooked inside military regalia, although paradoxically, deep down he still felt attached to his military persona.

The fairytale kingdom everyone imagined the royal family to exist in had become quite the opposite for Harry, who had always looked for ways to rebel. The rituals of tradition had simply never seemed cool to Harry who was always trying to find new ways to sabotage and rough up his royal image.

But lately, hanging out with James Corden, the Obamas and Oprah Winfrey, wasn't quite the cutting edge make over he had perhaps imagined when he first plotted his aristoratic 'prison break' out of Frogmore Cottage in Windsor with his Los Angeles wife.

And more recently he and Meghan had both been starkly warned by members of their PR team that their popularity was on the verge of a steep decline in America (their core market audience) due to an optics failure as a consequence of the death of his grandfather the Duke of York followed by the decline in health of his grandmother Queen Elizabeth II, the current seventy year reigning monarch of Great Britain.

Although he felt bad about some of the fallout from his move abroad to America, Harry's biggest fear above all else was not appearing cool anymore. The very thought terrified him far more than any amount of acrimony and alienation from his own royal family. Had he overlooked some better solution to wedding his past with his present in order to make a happier future? Meghan didn't think so.

Restless nights ensued as he found his old life wrestling with his new one inside his head. In anguish he would turn to Meghan in the middle of the night, forgetting that they slept in separate bedrooms. Doom scrolling through social media platforms to take a private census of public opinion would leave him feeling even worse about his current state of affairs.

Heavy it may be to wear the crown, but Harry felt as if he was wearing his own metaphorical crown of thorns and slowly they were beginning to grow inwardly, pricking his conscience.

But after breakfast he would shake off that uncertainty with a walk with his beagle Guy and labrador Oz.

Months later, standing behind his grandmother's coffin as the procession was led from Buckingham Palace to Westminster Hall, Harry found himself returned to that place he was as a child when his original unease at being a royal first became an issue for him.

As the British public watched every step of his flanking both sides of the procession, he felt as if he could hear all of their gossipy thoughts and murmurs directed toward him like an army of tiny ants. Being the villain in the story was cool to Harry. Villains often steal the show, he thought privately to himself. But just wait for my redemption. They'll love me more than ever in the end he felt convinced. He often thought of himself as Bruce Wayne and not just because they both shared a similar childhood tragedy that defined their character growing up. The comparison also made sense to him because he felt that he possessed his own super power over the true villains of this piece.

In many ways, as he'd discussed with Meghan, he held the sword of Damocles over the monarchy now, though not so much with a sword as with a book and just so long as he had that secret weapon, he knew he had all the power.

He stared at his grandmother's coffin draped in the royal standard and felt a defining sense of the old world passing and a new one just beginning, one that he would have a hand in shaping.

No longer Once Upon A Time but Very, Very Soon.