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Third Person's POV

Emilia Rogers-Stark staggered into her apartment, exhaustion causing her body to make slow unsure movements. Placing her keys on the table by the door, Millie debated whether or not she thought she could make it to her bed.

Nodding to herself, Millie took a step forward, the action reminding her how much her exhaustion was affecting her body, and the nodding turned to shaking her head as she just took another couple steps forward and collapsed onto the couch.

Sometimes, on nights like these, Millie found herself wondering why she didn't have a regular job. A 9-5 sounded pretty good to the blonde woman right about now.

Not really though.

In truth, she loved her job and most everything that came with it. You see, Millie worked for a government organization called the Strategic Homeland Intervention, Enforcement and Logistics Division – or S.H.I.E.L.D. as Millie was trying to get people to start calling it – and she had just returned from a nine-day mission in Naples, Italy with her best friends and co-workers Natasha Romanoff and Clint Barton.

If we're being completely honest, it wouldn't make sense for Millie to work anywhere else as she had helped found the organization over forty years prior. And I know what you must be thinking: Millie must be old if she helped found S.H.I.E.L.D. that long ago – and you're not wrong, but it's not that simple.

Technically, Emilia Rogers-Stark was seventy-five years old, but you wouldn't guess that by looking at her. She looked eighteen-years-old – maybe nineteen or twenty at best – and she had since 1952.

Once she reached eighteen-years-old, she just seemed to stop aging, something that shocked Millie and her adoptive father Howard Stark. But, at that point, they really shouldn't have been shocked.

They had already known that Millie wasn't a regular person since an outburst in 1945 when she tapped into powers she hadn't known she had; she could control the four elements – fire, water, earth, and air.

The outburst had happened after she found out that Bucky Barnes – her first adoptive father Steve Rogers' best friend and one of the people she loved most in the world – had died on a mission during the war.

People say that time heals all wounds, but Millie knows that's bullshit. Sure, time helps heal most bodily wounds, but doesn't necessarily heal the wounds that are woven into a person's being.

To this day, Millie still missed Bucky as intensely as the day she found out. She missed Steve too, as he had died right at the end of the war, leaving her in the custody of Howard Stark.

Often, after their deaths, Millie found herself momentarily forgetting that they were dead and would turn as if to talk to them, only to remember why they weren't there. Time didn't make it hurt any less, all it ever did for Millie was allow her to get used to the reality which was that Steve and Bucky weren't there anymore.

But at least she had Howard to help make it through their deaths. She was just a kid when it happened, and Howard was her rock. She lived with him for just over forty-five years until late 1991 when he and his wife Maria got into a car accident on the way to the airport and died.

After their deaths, all Millie had left at the time was her adoptive brother Tony Stark. I mean, she still had people she loved like Peggy Carter and her family, but Tony was all Millie had left of her family.

But a few days after Howard and Maria's death, Tony and Millie had fight where some quite cruel things were said, and ever since that day, the siblings hadn't seen each other or spoken. Millie kept tabs on him in the media and through S.H.I.E.L.D.'s resources, but there had been no interactions between them in nineteen years.