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It's 1986, and Laura Lee was born to fly. She grew up watching airplanes and helicopters fly by, wishing she could be up there with the wind on her skin. Her wish came true when she was eight, and her Grandpa took her up in his rusty old Cessna. Looking down on the world, her stomach dropped. The excited anxiety made her skin prickle, and Laura Lee knew that this would be her purpose. When she was brought down and back to her parents, she jumped in their arms and begged to go again.
~~~
Her Grandpa died the next year. Lung failure. The plane was sold for scrap metal. Laura Lee never asked her parents to fly again.
~~~
It's 1996, and Laura Lee was born to fly. She never thought that she would be back in the air, flying a rusty old Cessna all by herself. She had dreamed of this moment millions of times, and the rush of the wind through the cracks in the dirty glass was drowned out by the beating of her heart. The dream she had kept within her bones would be the thing to save the Yellowjackets. To bring them home.
~~~ It's 1996, and the plane was on fire. ~~~
In another world, Laura Lee was not born to fly. In another world, her interest in the machines that could bring her up into the thin atmosphere was not the dream that carried her through the sky. In another world, Laura Lee would hesitate. Laura Lee would hesitate at the sight of her childhood toy on fire, unable to wrench away her eyes from the sight. A stray spark would land in the gas tank, just a moment too soon.
In another world, her bones did not scream with the desire to soar. But this was not another world, And by God, did Laura Lee's bones scream.
~~~
In this world, Laura Lee would move faster than she could think, unbuckling the flimsy strip of leather imitating a seat belt around her waist. She would open the door to the wide expanse of sky that she had yearned for her entire life and jump. The wind would roar around her, enveloping her in a blue, blue sky, before her body would inevitably hit the lake below.
But Laura Lee, like so many of the Yellowjackets, defies the inevitable.
In an act of some higher power, Laura Lee would not reach the ground. Just as her foot would leave the plane, her vision would explode in white hot pain as her back would split open to reveal an explosion not unlike that of the fate of the plane. But unlike the machine that brought her up into the swirling sky, Laura Lee would explode in a mass of feathers, bones, and blood. A gruesome sight that she would luckily not have to witness, if only because the pain in her back would cause her to black out.
The skin along her back would split open from her shoulder blades and down, revealing two jointed masses of bones, both covered in hundreds of brown feathers. Released from their prison in skin, they would extend outwards into the air, and would reach out far further than Laura Lee’s arm span.
They would catch on the wind, using the breeze that had been flowing through Laura Lee’s veins since she was eight to guide her up into the sky.
Because in this world, Laura Lee was born to fly