A/N Finally! I'm posting one of the stories I've been talking about posting for the last month. Yay! ;) Anyway, this first chapter is really short but it's just a prologue. Future chapters will be longer. Also, I don't write in first person POV very often but it just seemed to fit this prologue. The rest of the story will be in the third person style that I usually write in.

This is the first story in my Time Travel Changes Everything universe. The list of stories in this universe and the recommended reading order is at the bottom of my profile for anyone who is interested.

Prologue

My name is Steven Anthony Stark and I was born in 1989 to Anthony Edward Stark and Alia Rachael Stark. My dad gave me my first name and my mom gave me my middle name. My dad named me after his childhood hero and my mom named me after my dad.

My Parents met in college. My dad was seventeen and my mom was eighteen. They were married as soon as my dad turned eighteen and I was born ten months later. My dad's parents were already dead by that time and my dad didn't care about the company. He was happy with my mom so he essentially dropped off the map. The three of us lived in a normal little town, in a normal little house. No one knew who he was. No one who used to know him, knew he was married or had a kid and he was fine with that.

Until tragedy struck.

I was six when my mom died in a house fire. My dad and I survived but she died of her injuries. That night my dad became a single parent. He didn't have his wife anymore. He didn't have his house. All he had was me. He didn't have anywhere to go but back. He was twenty-five years old and he stepped back into the public spotlight and took over his father's company.

He had disappeared for seven years and he made sure to keep those years a complete secret. No one. No one knew about me. In school I had a different last name and made up parents. If anyone saw me with my dad, I was his cousin's child or a friend's child that he was watching for a short time. Once I turned fifteen, the cover story changed. I became the intern working for the company.

When I was little I thought my dad must have been ashamed of me or maybe I reminded him too much of my mother, but once I was older, I realized the truth. He was protecting me. He was giving me a normal childhood. He was keeping me out of the spotlight and now that's something I am very grateful to him for.

He had had to grow up in the public eye. Cameras and paparazzi were a constant in his childhood. He didn't want that for me. He wanted me to have something he hadn't had. Privacy. If no one knew I existed I would never be the public's entertainment.

When I was growing up, my dad told me all the stories about the great Captain America. They were my favorite stories. I knew my dad had named me Steve after Captain America, I had seen pictures of Steve Rogers, and as a teenager I bore an uncanny resemblance to Captain America. But I never had a good explanation for the likeness until I was eighteen and my life changed forever.

I was in the lab with my dad, working on one of his latest projects. Now I'm not a genius like my dad but I'm not an idiot either. My dad has taught me a lot of things about technology over the years, and tinkering with things was always a way for us to spend time together.

We were working on a device that would generate force fields. If it worked, it would be revolutionary, like most of my dad's ideas. He had had the idea for some time but it was never possible due to the extreme amount of energy the design required. But then my dad obtained this strange blue cube that could generate massive amounts of energy. If my dad could harness that energy, he could power the force field generator.

At first, we had had problems getting the cube to work and synchronize with the generator, but at last, we thought we had cracked it. I remember my dad making a final adjustment to the machine before standing back up and putting an arm around me. Together we looked at the large mass of technology we had spent the previous three weeks working on.

Then he asked me if I wanted to flip the switch to activate the generator.

What happened next is a bit of a blur. I remember flipping the switch and the generator humming to life but then it all went wrong. The humming got louder and higher pitched. Then it started sparking, and suddenly there was a bright flash of blue light as a bolt of something resembling blue lightning arced out and slammed into my chest.

The next thing I remember is waking up, feeling like I had been hit in the chest by a baseball bat. I was in a strange place with people dressed in odd clothes. The first thought I had was that it reminded me of hospitals in movies from the forties. That's when the cold, heart-stopping suspicion blindsided me. I managed to muster up enough strength to ask one of the nurses what year it was. To her credit, she didn't look at me like I was completely nuts as she answered that it was 1940.

That's when I knew. I wasn't named after Captain America. I am Captain America.