The Ghost [Marvel | Steve Rogers]

Chapter 8

Upstate New York, USA

Late Fall 2015

Flopping down on the couch in her and her mom's suite, Nina finally felt like she could breathe again.

Her exams were over. Done. She was officially done with high school the way she should have been back in the spring. Over the last couple days, her mom had taken her in to sit the tests—her new identity as Nina Thomson passing inspection flawlessly—and now all that was left to do was wait on the results. Though nervous as she always was in that anxious span between putting down her pen and learning her grades, Nina found herself far more confident in her results than she usually was. She was sure she had done well.

With the Twins occupied the last several weeks with the Avengers' latest mission—tracking down and neutralizing a rogue contractor going by the name Crossbones—she'd been throwing herself into studying, to the point where she was fairly sure she could recite some of her textbooks off by heart.

She was pretty sure she had never studied so hard in her life. She hadn't wanted to waste all the work that had gone into ensuring she still had a chance at getting into MIT. She'd found out since Nat had first revealed they'd gotten her in pending her exams just what all had gone into getting her in.

She'd known that Stark had played a role, of course—he'd been quite vocal about it, really—but it was only in the last week, shortly before she was set to sit the tests that she'd found out precisely how.

"Oh it was nothing," he'd waved off, when he'd appeared at the Compound for another one of his impromptu check-ins, somehow sounding almost disappointed that that was the case. Nina had made sure to corner him with the intent of not just thanking him for his help but finding out what exactly he had done. And as she'd suspected from what her aunt had shared of the man and her own limited experience, he had all but volunteered what she'd wanted to know almost without her even having to put in a whole lot of real effort.

"You'd already done most of the work," he'd said. "You'd already been accepted, apparently, so it was just a matter of convincing admissions to keep you accepted pending final grades, etcetera, etcetera, even though the deadline had passed. Easy really. It's amazing what people will do in the hopes of a generous donation." Nina had blanched at that comment.

"You didn't buy my way in, did you?" she'd asked in a panic. Tony had just laughed.

"No, I didn't. Not exactly," he'd said with a crooked grin. "It wasn't anything they weren't going to get anyway." He'd patted her on the shoulder then at her stricken expression, his blunt, forthright manner surprisingly reassuring. "Don't worry about it, Miss Thomson-formerly-known-as-Ryker. Think of it as me cashing in a favour for all the cash I've thrown at them over the years."

It had made her feel a little better.

"Besides, Widow and your mom did all the real work. I didn't even have to lift a finger on the tricky stuff. Just had to pull my alumna strings and chat up a few folks in admin and admissions."

It was thanks to her illuminating conversation with Stark that Nina had finally cornered her Aunt into sharing exactly what they had done to ensure she could go away to school. It sounded deceptively simple, really, though Nina had a fairly good inkling from her own experience with what could be done with a computer and the right know-how that it had been anything but. In simplest terms, Natasha and Nadine had 'tricked' her academic history into believing it belonged to Nina Thomson instead of Nicola Ryker, ensuring that the switch wouldn't be traced back to Nina's original identity while they were at it. As for as official documents went, academic and otherwise, Nina Thomson's records were complete while Nicola Ryker was now effectively a blank page. They had similarly 'tricked' the MIT Admissions department into thinking the same thing, that the application for Nicola Ryker belonged to Nina Thomson instead. It meant that neither they nor Nina had to go through the admissions process again, and that all that had really needed to be done on Tony's end was to convince them to keep her application and conditional acceptance open until her tests had been taken.