She looked at the document and felt like she had just heard the biggest joke of her life.
"Me?" She pointed at her own nose, her voice cracking from the absurdity. "Acting CEO? Ashley, have you lost your mind? Last year, I was still in Hell's Kitchen catching cheating husbands for two hundred bucks. Now you want me to run a company worth tens of billions?"
Ashley calmly pulled out a tissue and wiped the wine stain from her clothes, expressionless. "I'm not asking you to run it. He is. This is his order! It's in black and white! Look carefully!"
"I'm not doing it!" Jessica shoved the document back. "I can't do this! I can't even figure out Excel spreadsheets! I want to go back to my apartment and sleep!"
"You can refuse," Ashley said coldly. "But do you want to watch everything he built be destroyed? Do you want S.H.I.E.L.D. or the military to swoop in, take over Vought, and drag those children who believed in Homelander and came here with dreams of competing off to be experimented on?"
Jessica fell silent.
She remembered Wu Yanzu's final shout from within the pillar of light on the Bifrost.
"Take care of the house for me!!"
"...Fuck." Jessica shut her eyes in agony and drained the rest of her whiskey. "I hate this goddamn sense of responsibility."
She snatched up the document and signed her name without even looking at it.
The pen tip nearly tore through the paper.
"A wise choice, ma'am." Ashley immediately put on a professional smile. "So, would you like to issue your first resolution?"
"First..." Jessica pointed at the photo of a woman in a white bodysuit on the plane's display screen. It was her promotional image, with "QUEEN JONES" written beneath it.
"Change that