Inspired by the “epilogophilia” of three of the better fan fiction writers out there, this was my first stab at fan fiction. It’s an epilogue-after-the-epilogue for the Hardcastle & McCormick episode If You Could See What I See.

This was written in response to a “story starter” challenge on a Hardcastle & McCormick fan forum. The theme was “trust” and the story had to involve an example of one of the main characters demonstrating trust in the other. The story was not supposed to be “angsty” and brevity was considered preferable to length.

Another post-epilogue scene, this one is for the episode Ties My Father Sold Me, in which McCormick, on his 30th birthday, tracks down his father, Sonny Daye, who abandoned Mark and his mother on McCormick’s 5th birthday. Hardcastle goes with McCormick to Atlantic City, where Sonny Daye, former safecracker for the mob, is now a bad lounge singer in a casino. Sonny’s only redeeming feature is that he refuses to steal incriminating tapes from the FBI’s safe for a mob boss who owns the casino, leading to McCormick’s kidnapping and Hardcastle’s insistence, on the threat of physical violence, that Sonny break into the safe, get the tapes, and help him free McCormick. The episode ends with Sonny ditching McCormick once more, this time for a better gig in Boston.

In the third season episode Brother Can You Spare A Crime, McCormick reproaches Hardcastle when he discovers to his great surprise that the Judge has a brother, because at one time he asked Hardcastle that very question: “Remember that night when the power went out and you and I sat around all night with a bottle of tequila talking about when we were kids, and I asked you whether there were any more at home like you: any sisters or brothers?” So…they sat around all night with a bottle of tequila, did they?

This story represents my first stab at a stand-alone Hardcastle & McCormick story rather than an epilogue to a broadcast episode or a story-starter challenge response. As I recall it was inspired by my real-life, belated realization that there are organic limes and regular limes, and my subsequent attempt to pay the grocery store the difference.

Fans of Hardcastle & McCormick frequently lament that the program ran for just three seasons, but some of the fanfic writers who participated in the show’s Yahoo Groups forum agreed to contribute stand-alone stories for a hypothetical fourth season. In one of the third season episodes, McCormick is chagrined about vacationing with Hardcastle in the mountains of Oregon. When their misadventure is over Hardcastle swears that next year they’ll go to Hawaii. Well, here it is the fourth season, and here they are in Hawaii.