I had rheumatic fever. Kept me outta school for a long time and it left me with a heart murmur, so my folks wouldn't let me enlist for a while. I wanted to go right after Pearl Harbor. [It's more than he might have offered all at once under different circumstances, but that sense of kinship isn't just on Steve's end. Gene had been young enough to still feel profoundly left out for being small, skinny, and sickly, even if eventually he realized maybe it wasn't such a bad thing people didn't want him to play football with them because he didn't actually like playing football or whatever else, and having another person around who didn't care about that made it easier, especially without Sid around.]

But you're alright now, after- [Gene actually really only knows the bare bones of the story here, but he can kind of guess.] You became Captain America?