At the end of the day, his training didn't fail him. Kurt might be more empathetic to outsiders than the rest of his brothers and sisters but at the end of the day, he made the tough decisions and had seen enough death that it barely even phased him anymore. He'd seen more than one of his fellow Spartan-II's die during the Augmentation procedures and seen even more soldiers fall to let senseless death bring him down.

Because there was always going to be someone else who needed you and if you allowed yourself to be mired down with regrets and crippling fear then you could not do your duty. No one here had met a Spartan-II that he could tell and Kurt had spent so much time out of armor that he'd grown used to baring himself so to speak. Enough so that he hadn't even thought about trying to hide his scars when he pulled the gloves off. Not that it an easy feat considering they lined each finger and major muscle group where they had literally cut them open in order to graft the ossification compound to their bones. But York's unexpected question had tiny little alarm bells going off in his head and the Spartan's expression went curiously blank.

He knew his name? Sure, it was completely possible York could have heard him talking to one of the medical staff but it still tripped some latent watchful paranoia all the same. "I am. And you are?"