Warnings: Violence, cussing, and references to disturbing topics mentioned previously in the round robin.

Health Warning from Min:  Don't drink anything while reading or it might wind up going down the wrong way.  David gets off some real zingers in here.

Notes: The "Golden Goose" RR is AU, going off in its own direction after Ultimate X-Men #10. As such, the X-Men's escape from Weapon X went down much differently from the comics, and characters like Nathaniel Essex, Mystique, Madelyn Pryor, et al never showed up. But leave it to a bunch of moderately insane fanfiction writers to drag a bunch of characters from the core comics universe and make them major players. Hey, it keeps us off the streets.

Sure, there were the requisite reactions of shock and anger. Even swearing. But he had to admit that in his long life, this was the first time he'd shown up someplace and been promptly dubbed:

"'The Shadow Eyes'?" he asked, repeating the words just uttered by the tall Native American girl he knew to be Danielle Moonstar. He chuckled and audibly blew air out of his mouth. "I'll have you know that while I have been called an awful lot in my time, I rather despise codenames." He removed his glasses and glared at the girl with eyes that absorbed light for later projection into focused energy beams, then added, "especially something as uninspired as 'Shadow Eyes'."

"Wh-who is this guy?" he heard Alex Summers ask as the boy peeked around his brother to see what was going on. The heat buildup inside him was incredible, Essex could tell, and the rising power made his whole body tremble and sweat as if from a fever.

The Wolverine narrowed his beady eyes, shifting Jean Grey's unconscious body in his arms so that he could continue to carry her while using his claws effectively to keep Essex at bay. "It ain't gonna matter who he is for too much longer," he replied to Alex's question.

"Such bravado," Essex commented with a hint of boredom. "Though I suppose I should expect nothing less from the lot of you, as you've gone through all the trouble to escape and led me across the globe. But you've had your fun, children. It's time to come home."

That seemed to be exactly the wrong thing to say, as Cyclops' temper flared up even further, and his optic blast followed suit. "Fuck you!" he shouted, though his words were all but drowned out by the sharp fzash of energy output as he fired a beam from his visor at Essex. The scientist had no time to react, and was carried off his feet by the optic blast.

"Damn," Wolverine muttered, as he watched Essex skid and roll on the ground a good fifty feet from the porch. "Guess discussin' our differences with him over tea is out."

Grass and dirt stains on Essex's uniform were the least of his problems, as the blast singed a large hole in it and shattered his ribs with the force of a wrecking ball. He coughed up blood, eyes widened in total disbelief. "That was . . . incredibly rude!" He rolled onto his back and shouted at the small army of Weapon X soldiers stationed on the lawn, "move in! Move in, damn it!" But it hurt too much to shout properly, so all he could do was hiss his orders.

The soldiers converged as instructed, opening fire on any available target with a pulse. They knew Essex wanted him alive, of course, but caring was another matter. It was unlikely that Essex would live too long, anyway.
 
 
 
 

Automatic gunfire tore through the air, and Wolverine raced for the door to the house, making sure to keep his body between Jean and the bullets. He felt the dull hammering of metal rounds plowing into his back, but the pain wouldn't register until soon after. The impact, however, sent him and the girl in his arms straight through the screen door and into the living room.

Storm and Danielle raced each other into the house as Cyclops covered their retreat, rapidly tapping the palm trigger in his glove to "machine gun" his visor lens' opening and closing. The result was a series of short energy bursts that sprayed the battlefield like bullets, tagging the closest soldiers. Cyclops quickly ducked into the doorway, a bullet grazing his shoulder in the process. He barely noticed.

"Now that they've pinned us in here," Cyclops reported as soon as he moved clear of the doorway, "they're going to surround the house and come in from all sides. They're also going to pump gas in the place." On that note, he fired another beam out of a window and tagged an incoming tear gas cannister, sending it straight up and back down into the soldier's midst as it exploded. Then he turned back to his colleagues. "But they're not going to take us if he work together. Storm, cook us up a storm cloud. Make the weather as unfriendly for the soldiers as possible; we need to delay them." He pointed to Dani and the recovering Wolverine. "You and Wolverine, get the redheads and my brother into the basement -- I'm assuming this place has one." To Dani directly: "what's your name?"

"Dani."

"Dani. Once you're down there, stay there. This is going to get ugly."

Dani lit up in a display of sheer indignance. "But I can take care of--"

"Now dammit! This isn't a debate!"

Danielle scowled, then saw that Alex's condition was getting worse, so she led him by the hand and searched for a basement. She quickly found one and motioned for Wolverine to carry both Madelyne and Jean toward it. Logan wasn't up to full strength, though, as his bullet wounds took time to heal. Time none of them had.

"Yeah, let's everybody just listen to Red-Eye," sneered Sabretooth from his lookout position at one of the windows. He'd apparently acquired a shotgun from someplace while Cyclops wasn't looking. "Who died and made you C.O. all of a sudden?" He fired off two shots as fast as it took to cock his gun.

Cyclops kept himself busy firing at soldiers who tried to enter through the windows. "You want to run the show? Be my guest. But this isn't Weapon X, asshole; you outranked me there but that doesn't mean a damn thing here."

Sabretooth fired off another shot. "My house, shithead."

An enormous clap of thunder interrupted the argument. "Will you two shut the hell up with all that macho shit so I can concentrate?" Storm asserted as she kicked the winds outside up to hurricane levels, tossing humans into the orchard surrounding the house. Heavy rain saturated the ground, making it difficult for the soldiers to even gain footing. Branches broke off of the nearby trees, battering the soldiers.

Cyclops chuckled, then tapped his commbadge. "Wolverine, is everyone secure down there?"

"Yeah," Wolverine's voice reported. "Everyone's in the basement. I'm guarding the entrance in case some WX cannon-fodder try to come in."

Sabretooth put in his own two cents. "Tell him that if anything happens to my little girl, I'm decoratin' my Christmas tree with that metal skeleton of his!"

Wolverine snorted, hearing that. "Tell Garfield up there that he shouldn't worry his mangy little head about his kid, and that if he wants my adamantium so bad, he should get it the old fashioned way: order it on eBay." He was about to say more, but Dani and Alex's voices became rather loud and insistant. "Hold on a sec, Cyke; the natives are gettin' restless. Your baby brother's glowin' like a night-light."

Cyclops' eyebrows shot up behind his visor. "What? Keep him there! Try to calm him down, and--"

"Too late. He's trying to barge his way past -- Aargh!"

"Logan?"

"He just shoved me aside. His touch fuckin' burns, Summers. He just left the basement. Said something about he was gonna explode, and didn't want to catch any of us in it."

"Shit" Cyclops made a beeline for the basement, abandoning his post, and saw a white-hot Alex charging out the back door. "Alex!"

"Scott! Where are you going?" Storm shouted to Cyclops as he followed his brother out. He didn't listen. "Scott! We've got freakin' El Nino out there; you're gonna get your sorry ass killed!"

He didn't listen.

"Hunh. I thought he'd never leave," Sabretooth snickered, eliciting a deadly glare from Storm.
 
 
 
 

The first thing Scott noticed when he exited the house was how abnormally ... calm the weather in his immediate vicinity was. Beyond a certain distance, the weather roared on in a savage frenzy of wind and rain. He realized Ororo had probably repositioned the eye of the storm so that it had extended beyond the confines of the house in order to keep him and Alex within it. But that meant resizing the radius of calm itself, and putting an even larger strain on Ororo's abilities. He didn't have much time.

Alex made tracks deeper and deeper into the cluster of trees that comprised the massive orchard that surrounded the house, his body seemingly glowing brighter with each step. The damp ground thankfully prevented Alex from starting a fire with the amount of heat he was generating.

Scott dashed as fast as he could after his brother, closing the distance between him thanks to his longer legs and greater endurance. Alex looked almost winded up ahead, and the younger Summers stopped at a clearing just beyond the orchard. Oddly, he didn't even seem to notice the strong winds that threatened to carry him off. Scott finally reached him, yelling his name. "Alex! What are you doing!"

"Stay back!" Alex shouted above the winds. "I don't want to hurt you!"

"What are you trying to do, kill yourself?"

"I'm gonna blow up! I can feel it! Stay back!"

"You're not gonna blow up, Alex! Trust me!"

"How do you know that? Do YOU glow when your power gets out of control?" Scott could tell by Alex's voice that his brother wanted the answer to be yes, and that this would be okay.

"No," Scott replied instead. "Not really, but -- "

"Scotty, I can't hold this back anymore!"

Scott looked up at the Weapon X airship above them. The storm prevented it from getting any closer to the house. A smile lit his face, and he told Alex, "focus it into a beam and channel it out of your hands! Your power works differently than mine; it can be extended in a forcefield, but maybe it can be focused!"

Alex considered the idea it once recently when his power first manifested, but he didn't know how, and he killed two people with it. Sure, they were would-be rapists, but he doubted his power would discriminate between them and his own brother. And his brother he wanted to keep. "I can't!"

"Yes, you can, dammit! Just concentrate and point it straight up! I know you can do this!"

He watched as Alex tried to focus all of his energy into his hands, but had great difficulty. "It's not working!"

"Okay, you need a target?" Scott pointed up to the airship, and specifically to the diamond-shaped 'X' insignia on its hull. "See that X up there? That's your target! Aim for the center of that X!"

"You want me to hit that?"

"Yes! Just trust me, okay?"

"All right," Alex acquiesced, then furrowed his brow in concentration. He raised both fists at the airship, aiming for the giant X as instructed.

Scott held his breath, watching his brother channel everything he had into his fists. He abruptly noticed that being near Alex seemed to energize his own mutant power, and that his reservoir of concussive energy was refilling itself behind his eyes. At least if he's leeching a bit off of Alex's energy supply, maybe the kid won't be as dangerous and uncontrollable. Hopefully there's no reason both Summers brothers had to have uncontrollable powers.

Alex finally opened his hands, releasing the energy he'd held back all this time. The discharge was defeaning and blinding at the same time, sending a beam of concentrated cosmic energy at the airship and superheating the air in its path. While Cyclops' optic blasts gave off very little heat (just the bare minimum required by the excitement of energy particles), Alex's power was the next best thing to a solar flare. The energy beam punched right through the airship, leaving a motlen hole in his wake. Massive explosions shook the airship on its way down, and it landed in a field some distance away from the brothers.

They watched the airship erupt into fireballs for a few minutes, then realized the storm Ororo created had vanished. There was barely even a breeze, and the enormous thunderclouds had broken up and moved on. "Dammit, we've got to get back to the others," Cyclops muttered. "Are you all right?"

"I'm . . . I'm fine, I think," Alex replied, shivering again. "Just a lot colder than I was before." He took a step toward Scott, then collapsed from near-exhaustion.

Scott dove and caught him. "I've got you!"

"And I've got you," a voice behind them announced. Scott and Alex turned to find Nathaniel Essex walking toward them, rather calmly and noticeably undamaged. "All that work, down in flames," he continued. "Someone has to pay for that."

Go on to Paxnirvana's "It All Goes South"

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