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Observance is easy.
You cannot be a trained killer without also understanding how to observe your targets: when they are vulnerable and weak, when they are alert, and when death finally takes hold of them— so you will not be punished for leaving the mission incomplete.
One thing that Barnes has observed since before he even knew he was Barnes and was still only an asset, is that he has always walked differently, compared to everyone else.
In HYDRA, this observance made perfect sense. He— it, then— was not a human person, but a machine, designed for not much more than the deliverance of death. The Winter Soldier would never walk the exact same way that a person does. It is simply not a person.
The Soldier had never been directly told that its nonhumanity was why it walked differently, of course, but it was a logical assumption for it to make given its observations. Why would HYDRA tell it otherwise?
In retrospect, HYDRA would never refute this assumption. They would likely punish it simply for thinking about anything on its own, regardless of the fact that the thought aligned with their views.
Barnes still does not think of himself as a person. It is painfully obvious even to the untrained eye how uncomfortable people seem to get with the idea of someone so human-looking not seeing themself as human. Their looks had grown irritating to see, and so he had simply stopped talking about it.
They, on the other hand, had not stopped talking about the way that he walked.
It is not often, not anymore, and in the beginning, it hadn’t even been a surprise. One of the legs had broken and healed improperly when he had found them, and it had impacted his gait, regardless of how much he proved his functionality to them.
The Captain had given him a Look when they had finally managed to get the leg checked over. Barnes had lacked the context then, and still lacks it now, but he knows that some part of himself hadn’t liked how he felt when the Captain gave him that Look.
Even when the leg was fixed and he did not walk as wrongly as before, he still walked different, according to them. He is always different, in the way that he always either holds too little or too much eye contact. Barnes learned a long time ago, when he was still an asset, that it was best never to speak, and so he rarely ever does. Another difference.
Despite his many irregularities, he knows how to appear normal enough for just long enough to get lost inside a bustling crowd; how to wash himself away in the tide of city folk. If he did not know how to adapt to his environment, they would have put him down decades ago.
He knows how to walk the normal way, the way that everyone else seems to. He simply does not like to. His therapists told him that it was a very good thing, that he is learning his likes and dislikes— an even better thing, to express them. Even if not verbally, he is still choosing to do something on his own. Because he likes to. Because he wants to.
The thing is, the normal way to walk hurts, and it hurts like hell. That is not to say that the way that he walks does not bring him no pain at all — such a thing can be nothing else but an impossibility — just that it hurts marginally less. The Asset had been taught, shown, that chaos was order and order was pain.
The Asset hadn’t liked pain, not really. It had listened and learned and it had been so good in the end. Good enough that it had done the right thing, the thing that would have gotten it sent to be dismantled if it had returned like it should have. In a way, it was, and Barnes was reassembled with its dirty, rusted parts.
The arm hasn’t rusted, even after all these decades, but the sentiment remains. Probably.
Barnes suspects that the arm is one of the many possible reasons behind the pain that goes through him when he walks. Some days, it is a blooming pain that unfurls like the petal of a flower blooming on his empty grave. Others, it a blinding pain that strikes him like thousands of volts straight through his spine.
He never knows what he’s going to get, if it will shift throughout the day, the hour, the minute.
The Runway Walk — as Stark had begun to call it, along with a few other strange names Barnes hadn't cared to memorize — minimizes the pain. There is still a strain on the body, there always will be. That is what happens when you graft muscle and plumes of titanium sinew.
It is better than having no arm at all, Barnes guesses, but sometimes he wishes he could just rip it off to make it all stop. Maybe he had, and they just put it back on.