There wasn't really another word for it: whatever reaction she'd expected from James, it hadn't been anger. The way his hands tightened on her and the step he'd had to forcibly take back, like she'd belted him in the gut with something too heavy for him to absorb. Tony had been angry - but she'd parried her way around Tony's anger and deflected. Clint was Clint, but he wasn't the one she'd forced to let go of her hand on the side of a mountain, and when she had run to him first-thing on arrival, there had been too many other things swirled into that meeting for anger to be the one that floated to the top.
In the face of James Barnes's raw, visceral anger, she came up short, for the moment at least. If she had seen the Winter Soldier in soldat mode plenty of times over the years, the last time she had seen this, James, James the person this furious had been before Steve, the Avengers, any of the rest of it, on a joint operation between the Red Room and Hydra when she had been pinned down. When it had looked (when it had felt) for a moment as though she had no hope of making it out, but the job still would have been complete and a dead Black Widow would have been acceptable collateral damage. Until the Soldier had strayed from parameters and burst back in. Until he had carved the heart out from the chest of the man who'd almost meant her end in a much bloodier show than had been necessary, in a way that had finally aroused suspicion among their handlers.
That was the last time she'd seen this look.
Shit.
But she gathered herself, because it was her decision, and it had been her choice, and it was not an indefensible one. "No one's saying my life was worth less. James - look. Steve would say it was worth it when he put his plane down in the ice. Clint was a wreck of a person, and he was - aside from you, he's the only one that's ever counted, for me, and besides that, the rest of the team was counting on it." She appreciated Carol right then, for giving her the words she could reach for. "Was it fair? Of course not. Was it worth it? If they pulled it off, of course it was worth it. I've known how to do a cost-benefit analysis since I was six."