Title: Ghosts of Mars

Word Count: 2814

Overall Summary: Two hundred years of Spec Ops wasn't long enough to prepare her for the Enterprise crew.

Pairing: McCoy/Kirk

Warnings: Language, mature themes and situations. Fem!Bones, Reaper!Bones. Hint of twincest if you squint right.

Part 3: History is made, but the future is not always set in stone. The destruction of the USS Kelvin proved that.

Author's Notes: At long last, the promised Kirk/McCoy meeting. It took a bit, but between kids and birthdays and generally busy weeks of appointments and meetings and such, it's finally done! Huzzah. Some may recognize lines in the bar and shuttle scene: these are not mine, and I lay no claim to them. They were taken directly from the movie itself, and are credited to the screenwriters of the film.

The notion that Bones might be able to smell someone who could safely take the C24 I first discovered in a fic archived on this site. (I cannot recall who it was right now; if you read this fic and you know, please tell me, and I will properly edit it in this A/N.) It's an expansion of the Doom monsters being able to sense who was violent, and who wasn't, so not entirely original, but I'd still like to credit it.

oOoOoOo

McCoy Ranch

Undisclosed location, Kentucky

March 22, 2233

Penny McCoy unlocked her door, stepped inside, let her go-bag thunk onto the floor, and threw herself face-down on the couch. She hadn't been home in more than a month, and it had been a busy month at that. More species coming out of the woodwork, more save-the-galaxy bullshit from her handlers at Section 31. Warp drive improving, more galaxy to defend.

One of these days, she'd like to get her hands on those mysterious packages from the future that dictated the course of events Section 31 chose to take. All she'd ever seen had been the tantalizing glimpses rationed out in her mission briefings.

With a sigh, she flipped over to stare at the ceiling. Truth be told, she had been glad to get the action this last month. It had been over two years since Erib had shown up to call her to active duty, and Penny missed it. She knew why she'd been relegated to the wilds of Kentucky – ostensibly, to raise her four-year-old self, fucking timeline mechanical bullshit – but sitting on her ass never did anything but drive her crazy.

She was tired. Not physically – the C24 annihilated pretty much anything it came into contact with, including exhaustion – but mentally tired. Every thirty or so years, ennui set in, leaving her restless, bored and with the odd niggling thought of will airlocking myself kill me? She didn't want to die, per se, but sometimes she just couldn't get the scrolling list of the dead out of her head.

She forced herself to her feet, shaking the bleak thoughts out, and went into the kitchen. She eyed the replicator warily, then said, "Sweet tea, cold. Three ice cubes. One lemon wedge." There was a sparkle on the small pad, and a glass of lemonade beaded with moisture appeared. Penny sighed. Fucking things never worked right. No frigging mystery why starships didn't even have this technology yet, though she'd been told that someday it would be perfected.

She took the lemonade anyway and gulped down a couple of mouthfuls. It was far too lemony with not enough sugar. Penny drank it anyway.

She tossed the glass into the disposal, hearing the crashing tinkle as it broke. Didn't matter; the matter recompiler, or whatever that little doohickey inside was called, would reconstitute it the next time she asked for something and didn't get it. The shattering glass almost, but not quite, covered the telltale tingling whine of a transporter being activated.

Her nose twitched. Sandalwood soap over sweat and smoke. Her brow furrowed. Not Erib. She spun as her hyperalert hearing registered a sound behind her, her old-fashioned pistol appearing like magic in her hand from where she had lodged it against the small of her back. "You got three seconds," she said evenly. "Start talking."

The man, a paunchy non-descript type with mousy hair and a plain, thin face, slowly raised his hands. "Major Grimm," he said, and her hackles rose at the long, long disused name. "I'm supposed to tell you experimental weapons and humidity never mix."

Penny hesitated a minute, then lowered her weapon. She didn't relax; no one would come to her using that code unless things had gotten seriously fucked up. She stared the stranger down and though he flinched, he didn't break eye contact. "Where's Commander Erib?"

The man swallowed. "Dead."

She snarled silently. She had liked Erib, goddammit. "How?"

"There's been an... incident." The man made a careful motion towards his hip, where his phaser hung beside a pouch. She eyed him, then nodded her permission. He had come knowing a name a hundred years dead, with a code she herself had given Section 31 to use. Unless he pulled and started firing his cute little laser pistol, she'd let him do what he came to do.

"Define 'incident'."

When she didn't stop him, he pulled a personal padd from the belt at his hip. "At 0845 hours yesterday morning, an unknown vessel attacked and destroyed the USS Kelvin. Commander Erib was aboard."

Penny took the device – damn things were getting smaller and sleeker all the time – and scanned through the information. Advanced weaponry, Romulan similarities, blah blah blah. She looked up at the man, an eyebrow arched. "This isn't in the timeline."

"No," the man said. "Most of the crew and passengers made it off the Kelvin before the Romulan ship destroyed it, but there were a lot of casualties." He hesitated, a hand twitching across his nose. "Commander Erib was on the bridge. She didn't make it off."

Penny sighed and closed her eyes, mentally updating her list of the dead to include Erib. She had liked the Andorian, goddammit. "The Kirks?"

The man shook his head. "George Kirk was killed in action; he took command of the Kelvin, and lasted twelve minutes. Winona Kirk escaped the destruction in a medical shuttle, went into labour, and gave birth to a healthy baby boy. She and her son are currently en route to Earth, with the other survivors, for debriefing."

Penny glanced down at the appalling list of names on the padd in her hand. "None of this was supposed to happen."

"No, ma'am," the man agreed. "It wasn't. The Romulans don't have anything near that level of technology as yet; it looks like the ship that destroyed the Kelvin came from an unknown stretch of time in the future. Possibly a hundred years or more. It-"

She slammed the padd down onto the coffee table, hard enough that a crack spiderwebbed across the durable screen. The man jumped. "I've been Section 31's dancing monkey for over a hundred years, all on the premise that they had all this knowledge of the future. Now you're telling me, the future can change? That they suddenly don't know what the fuck is going to happen?"

The man's eyes skittered back and forth, between the hard-to-break padd she'd just damaged, to the leashed fury on her face. "I-I..."

"For a bunch of anal-retentive paranoid fucks, it didn't occur to any of you to make contingency plans? Just in case someone else decided to abuse time travel technology? Did you all assume, in your lofty ivory tower, that the future was all sewn up in a pretty bow, and all you had to do was sit back and reap the benefits?"

"I d-don't... That's above my paygrade."

She shook her head. Never in a million years would she ever have thought she'd miss Sanchez so much. That slippery little motherfucker would have been all over contingency plans. They'd have to invent new letters, he'd have so many in place. "Obviously standards at the Academy have gone down since I last taught there. Aren't they still teaching the plan rarely survives first contact with the enemy? What the hell did you think was going to happen?" She sighed, plunged both hands into her hair. "Jim Kirk is still alive?"

"Yes. Definitely."

"Any other mishaps I should know about? Assassins get loose on Vulcan and kill Spock? Did Sulu's parents not get married because of some last minute interference? Will Scotty not become a starship engineer because an uncle encouraged him to build moonshine stills in Aberdeen instead?"

"I don't... I don't know."

"Find out. Get back to me. And then get lost."

The man's eyes widened. "I'm assigned to be your handler," he protested and Penny sighed. It figured his backbone would emerge when his prestige was directly threatened.

"Let me lay it out for you, whoever you are. No, don't tell me. I don't give a flying fuck about your name, your rank, and your assignment. Fuck all that. I've been a good little soldier, doing my bit for this overglorified Federation. I held up my end of the deal. Now, I find out that your people haven't been doing theirs. They half-assed it. And as far as I'm concerned, half-assing something like this is a deal-breaker."

The man sputtered. "You can't just-"

Penny snorted. "Watch me," she said. She gestured pointedly at the open door. "Show yourself out. I've got work to do."

oOoOoOo

Shipyard Bar

Riverside, Iowa

2255

Jim Kirk, at first glance, was nothing special. He had the unconscious swagger of the terminally cocky, his nose had obviously been broke once or twice, and his grin was equally mocking and self-deprecating. He reminded her a lot of herself, before the RRTS, before the C24. Brash and ballsy, with no fear for consequence.

He was also the spitting image of Sam, something the snaps and stills she'd seen in the Future Files over the years hadn't quite gotten across. Her pulse fluttered every time she thought too hard about it.

She sat in the corner, nursing a drink (though it wouldn't have mattered if she pounded them back by the dozen), and watching the drunk-off-his-ass Kirk try unsuccessfully to hit on a pretty, black Starfleet cadet. His pickup lines were so bad, she didn't know why this Uhura girl didn't turn around and deck him. Then again, this was supposedly the new age of peace and tolerance. Happy, hippy horseshit, she liked to call it.

She found it hard to believe that this self-destructive kid was supposed to be the man who would pioneer a new era in space exploration. On the other hand, she thought maybe that's what the Romulans had intended when their future ship tried to kill him in the first place.

She rattled the ice cubes in her glass idly, chin propped on her hand, as she watched Kirk make a complete ass of himself. He didn't even blink twice as the beefy cadet he flippantly called Cupcake laid hands on him. Cupcake and his cronies were really working Kirk over by the time Lenore finished her drink. She debated an intervention of her own, but the point was made moot by the arrival of Captain Pike. He took charge, kicked everyone out, and settled down for a nice long chat with Kirk. She was unobtrusive in the corner, half-hidden in shadows. She doubted Pike even knew she was there.

"...You like being the only genius-level repeat offender in the midwest?"

"Maybe I love it."

Lenore smirked and signalled the waitress for another drink. Yup. Kid had balls, alright. Maybe there was hope for this century after all. Still, Pike wasn't going to get him back on track that way. No. Johnna Grimm had needed something more to sting that pride, make it a challenge. So would James Kirk.

"...your father was Captain of a starship for twelve minutes. He saved eight hundred lives, including your mother's. And yours. I dare you to do better."

"That will do it," she murmured. She tossed down the drink the girl had just brought and slipped out the door behind Pike, leaving Kirk alone in the bar, staring at a salt shaker shaped like his father's ship.

oOoOoOo

Starfleet Shipyard

Riverside, Iowa

The Next Day

Lenore had a window seat in the shuttle, where she was sat waiting for Jim Kirk to make his appearance. It was almost time for the shuttle to depart; most everyone was already in their seats. The pretty cadet, the group of thugs, a bored-looking gentleman. No Kirk.

She glanced out the porthole in time to see him sliding off his bike, all long legs and sun-bleached hair. He tossed the keys to another cadet and strode towards the shuttle. Lenore's pulse skipped a couple of beats and her stomach did a few more barrel rolls. If she didn't know any better...

"You've gotta be fuckin' kidding me," she muttered, ignoring the scandalized look her seatmate gave her at the vulgarity. She was over two hundred years old, for chrissake! She was way too old for teenage crushes.

"Four years?" she heard Kirk say at the front of the shuttle. "I'll do it in three."

The next thing she knew, she was in the bathroom with her head in her hands, trying to get control of her breathing again. She blinked, trying to figure out what the fuck had just happened. She pondered it for a moment, but all she could come up with was that, just like the C24 jacked up her fight response, it also jacked her flight response.

She growled. Johnna Grimm, Joann Samuels, Lenore McCoy, whoever the fuck she was supposed to be this decade... None of them ran away from anything. She was not going to start now.

Still, it might not be a bad idea to sit in here for a bit and compose herself. If she tricked herself into thinking it was a tactical retreat, she could live with it.

She got five minutes before the officer in charge of making sure seat belts were fastened and tray tables locked in their upright positions started banging on the door, asking her if she needed a doctor.

"I don't need a doctor," she snarled. "I am a doctor!"

There was a brief scuffle as the door was jimmied open, and the officer came in with that no-nonsense look on her face Lenore always associated with security. She laid an authoritative hand on Lenore's shoulder. Lenore let her. "You need to get back to your seat, now."

"I suffer from aviophobia. It means fear of dying in something that flies." She hadn't been afraid of dying in a plane or chopper since long before the doomed trip to Olduvai, but she needed an excuse to have locked herself in the bathroom. Rabbited away from a kid a fraction of my age because he reminds me of my dead brother wasn't good enough.

"Ma'am, for your own safety, sit down, or else I'll make you sit down."

It took everything Lenore had not to laugh in the woman's face. She looked like she could handle herself in a fight, but if Lenore didn't want to let her force her back into the seat, the woman wouldn't have a prayer of following through on her threat. She let the woman shove her back down, next to a busted-up Jim Kirk, who was watching with bemusement. "Fine."

The woman smiled brightly. Lenore's hackles rose, but she forced herself to stay in her seat. "Thank you."

Pike's voice floated from the direction of the comm unit, informing the passengers that they'd been cleared for takeoff. Lenore closed her eyes and took a deep breath, then immediately wished she hadn't. Jim Kirk, however showered he looked, still stank of bar smoke and spilled booze, sweat and blood and pain. She could smell each thing as strongly as if it had just happened.

And carried under all of that was a hint of something Lenore had not smelled in well over a hundred and fifty years. It was clean and sweet and seductive and familiar. It took her a moment, but finally it dawned on her. Oh Christ on a stick, it wasn't enough he had a strong physical resemblance to Sam. He had to fucking smell like him too.

It took her another minute to remember why Sam had smelled so attractive. Her stomach stopped doing flips and started roiling, sending queasy pulses up through her throat. It was the C24, recognizing compatibility, and her brain's interpretation of the impulse. She swallowed a couple of times, hard. Kirk looked at her with both eyebrows raised.

She hauled out her hip flask, took a long swig of Romulan ale to wash the taste of bile away. Her stomach continued twisting. "I may throw up on you," she told him, and offered him the flask.

oOoOoOo

Endnote: The next chapter crunches the three Starfleet Academy years, and will see the return of Reaper as Jim's sometime guardian angel. It's not like Johnna/Lenore really needs to study, after all.

Thank you to everyone who's put this on story alert, or favorited it. It really makes my day when I see another notification for favoriting or story reviews in my email inbox.

The next update will not take as long as the last one has, I promise.