I love the Vicar of Dibley. with the burning passion of a thousand suns.
But this is the first fanfic I've ever written for it. It literally popped into my head at 2am.
The Last Romantic also entitled: How Harry came to Dibley.
He never did like Rochester. Or Heathcliff.
Harry preferred Darcy, Thornton, Ferras, and even Pip.
He was never the dark and brooding type. The Byronic antihero of his novels. He was Sir Percival, not King Arthur; whatever demons that always seemed to dwell beneath the surface of these greater men were not within Harry. He had no tragic childhood (excusing of course, the inevitable bullying that came with always having your nose in a book and your twin sister being your best friend), no long lost love, no tortured soul.
Heathcliff – he just couldn't relate. Rochester – he seemed to take personal offense to the man locking his wife away; mad or not.
Rosie always teased him. While other little boys his age were trying to decide whether they wanted to be a Jedi Master or a Sith Lord; he seemed to dream of being the White Knight, or the dashing prince in a fairy-story. Fighting dragons for his lady's favour. His mother and father rolled their eyes and assumed it was just a phase.
He was fond (overly perhaps) of the 'Grand Romantic Gesture'. Of rushed and desperate confessions of love, passion undying and promises. His first 'Grand Romantic Gesture' was aged 13, his first real crush on one of his sister's friends. It had been the usual passing of notes and a stolen kiss or two, until she had scoffed at a lovenote he'd given her that had quoted "Gone with the Wind". Telling him how stupid it sounded and why did he even read those books weren't they for women and why couldn't he just try and cop a feel like a normal lad. He'd cried on Rosie's shoulder for an hour or two as she patted his back. Oh Harry.
He loved too deeply and too quickly. Head over heels Harry, as his mother fondly called him. Never stopping to think if this girl would break his heart too, because she might be The One this time (she never was though, in the end). The Grand Romantic Gesture's got a little grander as he got older, as his library became bigger. His last great love living with him in his flat in London, he had given away his heart for what he thought was the last time, only to have her shatter it again when she found her Drummel and left him there.
This time, Harry was adamant that things would change. Maybe he should consider moving away from the White Knight to a less wholesome character? Were the Grand Romantic Gesture's really what women wanted – his lovenotes, and cuttings from favourite novels, surprises and promises and kisses in the rain ("fucking hell Harry, now my hair is ruined!") – was his method too old fashioned and unrealistic? His life too shaped by the gentlemen in the books he read? His girlfriend's past had either loved or hated it but he had always seemed to attract women who (as he later discovered) never quite loved him back as fervently as he had loved them. So he tried for a little while, to become the boring accountant everyone expected of him.
And it came to him, in a flash of divine light one Thursday night a few years later - what he wanted. What he really truly wanted. To be loved with as much ferocity and joy as he loved, regardless of his making a tit of himself by shouting his adoration into a crowded street or trying to write a poem that would never quite be Shakespeare. He wanted the love-at-first-sight-punch-you-in-the-gut romance his 12 year old self had fawned over in the library, which his teenaged self had tried so hard to manufacture. He wasn't going to get it here, now, as this dull creature he'd become. He didn't need to change himself. But Harry did, however, need a change. London was a city of cynics. It was wearing him down, making him cold and hopeless.
Harry phoned his sister up and she gave him her blessing.
He looked online at houses for sale, and settled in the end for a house in a village that seemed to be lifted directly from an Austin or Hardy novel.
Dibley.
Sounded quite nice, really.
So yeah.
He always came across as a hopeless old fashioned romantic to me. But thats what Geraldine deserved really.
