🥀A Safe Place to Land 🌹
Jason Todd x Single Mom!Reader
Chapter Forty-Three False Patterns
Moretti is watching for the connection. So the Batfam gives him one. With Sophia safe at Wayne Manor, Reader steps into the strategy room instead of the sidelines, bringing a piece of her past to the board that no one else could have found. Jason moves into Gotham with a false trail to lay, Barbara controls the pattern, Tim muddies the data, Dick makes noise, and Moretti proves exactly why he is not a man to underestimate.
A/N: Thank you all so much for sticking with me while I find my rhythm again after the hiatus 😅 This chapter was one I really needed to get right because it shifts us from reaction into strategy. We are officially back on the board now: Reader is not bait, Jason is not spiraling, Sophia is safe, and Moretti is finally starting to understand that he is not the only one who knows how to play the long game. 🖤
🥀 A Safe Place to Land Master List 🌹
Reader POV
By the time you return to Wayne Manor, Sophia has apparently declared martial law in the drawing room.
You hear her before Alfred even gets the front door fully open—her little voice carrying through the entry hall with grave, three-year-old authority.
“No, Titus. Tea first.”
Alfred’s mouth twitches.
“I’m afraid the household has undergone something of a regime change in your absence, miss.”
You laugh before you can stop yourself, the sound loosening something in your chest as you step inside. “How bad is it?”
“Master Damian has been assigned snack distribution. Master Titus has been invited to tea. Master Ace has appointed himself personal escort.” Alfred reaches gently for your coat. “All appear to have accepted their responsibilities with admirable composure.”
From somewhere deeper in the house, Damian’s voice rises in immediate contradiction.
“Pennyworth, the dog is not drinking imaginary tea. He is contaminating the service.”
Sophia giggles.
Your heart folds in on itself.
You find them on the rug near the long windows, afternoon light pouring across the floor in warm squares. Sophia is seated in the middle of an elaborate tea party constructed from plastic cups, stuffed animals, and what appears to be one of Damian’s chess pieces seated in a saucer.
Ace is stretched out beside her, patient and watchful, his head resting near her knee. Titus sits on her other side with the dignified misery of a creature who has accepted that love occasionally requires humiliation.
Damian kneels across from her in immaculate posture, holding a tiny pink cup between two fingers like it might be evidence.
Sophia sees you.
“Mommy!”
She launches herself upright so quickly that Ace scrambles to move with her, immediately shadowing her small sprint across the room.
You catch her against you, the impact forcing you back half a step. Her arms wind around your neck, warm and sticky and familiar, and you hold her tighter than you mean to.
Not too tight.
Never enough for her to notice.
“Hi, baby,” you whisper into her curls.
“I had tea,” she tells you immediately. “And crackers. And Damian said Titus can’t eat the blue cup.”
“That is correct,” Damian says from the rug. “It is plastic.”
You look over Sophia’s shoulder. “Thank you for maintaining order.”
He gives you a curt nod, like this is an assignment he has performed to expectation and no more.
“She was adequately entertained,” he says. After a slight pause, quieter, “She did ask when you would return.”
Your throat tightens.
Sophia pulls back from your shoulder, one hand still curled in the collar of your shirt. “You came back.”
“Of course I came back.”
She accepts that immediately. No fear. No desperate grip. Just certainty, simple and clean.
Then she points toward the floor. “You have tea now.”
You allow yourself to be dragged into the middle of the rug.
For the next twenty minutes, you drink invisible tea from a cup far too small for your fingers while Sophia explains the complex social hierarchy of her stuffed animals. Ace shifts every time she shifts. Titus permits a purple napkin to be placed over one paw with monumental patience. Damian corrects her when she tries to serve a wooden block as a pastry, then quietly accepts it when she informs him it is actually cake.
You watch her laugh.
You watch her lean into Ace’s shoulder when she loses her balance, trusting without even thinking about it.
You watch Damian reach out automatically to steady her cup before it spills onto the rug, his movements careful enough that she never notices she needed help.
She misses you.
But she does not need rescuing from missing you.
The distinction hurts and heals in the same breath.
When Alfred appears at the doorway with a plate of real sandwiches, Sophia scrambles up again, instantly distracted.
“Lunch,” Damian announces with palpable relief, removing the tiny cup from his hand.
“You were doing wonderfully,” you tell him.
His expression goes flat. “I have faced armed assassins with less arbitrary rules.”
Sophia beams at him. “More tea later.”
Damian visibly calculates whether fleeing the country is an option.
You laugh softly, and that is when you feel the presence behind you.
Jason stands in the doorway.
He is dressed like himself instead of Red Hood—dark jeans, heavy boots, worn jacket—but the night still sits around him in quiet layers. His eyes go to Sophia first, as if checking the one fact he already knows to be true.
Safe.
Laughing.
Fine.
Then his gaze finds you.
The last time you saw him, he stepped into Gotham carrying the warmth of your hand and a decision neither of you could afford to treat lightly.
Now, instead of hesitating, he crosses the room.
He doesn’t make a performance out of it. Doesn’t pull you into him in front of everyone. His hand simply settles at the small of your back as he bends to press a quiet kiss near your temple.
Private, even here.
Deliberate.
Your breath catches anyway.
“Hey,” he murmurs.
“Hey.”
Sophia spots him before you can say more.
“Jason!” She abandons the sandwiches with shocking speed and barrels toward him.
Jason catches her easily, hauling her up against his side with a grunt that is mostly theater.
“Hey, trouble.”
“I had tea.”
“So I heard.”
“With dogs.”
His gaze flicks toward Titus, who still has the napkin over his paw.
“Looks like they loved it.”
“They did,” Sophia says confidently.
Damian rises to his feet, dignity reclaimed now that the tea service has been abandoned. “Todd. Brown and Drake arrived ten minutes ago. Gordon is in the Cave.”
Jason’s expression shifts.
Not cold. Not distant.
Focused.
His hand stays against your back.
“Time?” you ask.
He looks at you for half a second, checking—not for weakness, not for permission to exclude you.
For readiness.
You nod once.
“Yeah,” he says. “Time.”
⸻
The Cave is colder than the rest of the house.
Not unpleasantly so. Just deliberately. Stone and steel and screens lit in shades of blue, the underground air carrying that faint mineral damp beneath the clean scent of expensive technology.
You have been down here before.
Still, walking in with Jason’s hand brushing yours and Barbara waiting at the main console feels different.
This is not an invitation to witness.
It is an invitation to participate.
Barbara turns slightly as you approach, her wheelchair positioned within a crescent of monitors that paint pale light across her face. Tim sits at a secondary station with two laptops open and a drink beside him that looks like it has enough caffeine to qualify as a controlled substance. Dick leans against the edge of the platform, arms folded, looking far too cheerful for a meeting involving organized crime.
Bruce is not at the center console.
He stands farther back near the stairs, silent, present, letting this belong to them.
To you.
Dick looks up first. “There they are. Gotham’s most emotionally responsible tactical couple.”
Jason stops short. “I can leave.”
“You absolutely cannot,” Barbara says without turning. “Sit down.”
“I’m not sitting.”
“Then brood vertically and try not to interrupt.”
You bite the inside of your cheek.
Jason sees it. Narrows his eyes at you.
You smile sweetly.
That gets the faintest twitch at the corner of his mouth before he schools it away.
Barbara brings up a map of Gotham on the central screen.
Red markers blink across the Narrows, the East End, the waterfront, and several commercial blocks downtown. None touch your apartment. None touch Wayne Manor. They are scattered, almost meaningless until Barbara layers a second set of data over them.
Red Hood appearances.
Not all of them Jason’s. You can tell by the look he gives the screen.
“Someone’s adding sightings,” he says.
“Someone’s asking for sightings,” Tim corrects, fingers moving across his keyboard. “There’s a difference. Street-level chatter is being scraped for Hood references. Locations. Timing. Who he disrupts. Who he doesn’t.”
Dick tilts his head toward the map. “Basically, someone’s making a very creepy murder scrapbook.”
“Thank you for the technical summary,” Barbara says dryly.
“You’re welcome.”
Barbara zooms in on a narrow cluster near the waterfront.
“Moretti knows an information request around your name produced a response,” she says, looking at you. “He does not know the nature of that response. He does not know about Sophia. He does not know about you and Jason.”
She glances at Jason.
“But he has begun asking why Red Hood activity has started scraping the edges of his network.”
Jason’s jaw tightens, but his body does not shift away from you.
That matters.
“So we give him a reason,” you say.
Barbara’s mouth curves slightly. “Exactly.”
Tim turns one laptop toward the rest of you. “Moretti’s money is fragmented. Restaurants. Transportation fronts. Nightclubs. Small warehouse holding companies. We introduce enough disruption in one lane, and it becomes the obvious explanation for Hood’s interest.”
“Territory,” Jason says.
“Or trafficking,” Dick offers.
“Weapons,” Barbara says. “Cleaner. Believable. Red Hood intercepts a weapons route tied to one of Moretti’s fronts. Tim seeds transaction inconsistencies. Dick makes visible noise elsewhere to widen the apparent investigation. Jason applies pressure where they can see him do it.”
Jason looks at the board. “And he stops wondering about her.”
Barbara’s eyes remain on the screen. “He starts having better questions to ask.”
Not a promise.
A move.
You step closer to the display, reading the list of businesses as Tim scrolls.
Most of them mean nothing. Names designed to mean nothing. Holding companies named for dead relatives and streets that do not exist. An import office. Two bars. A private lounge.
Your breath stills.
“Stop.”
Tim’s hands freeze over the keyboard.
Jason turns toward you instantly.
“What?” Barbara asks.
You stare at one line halfway down the screen.
Vesper Room — Hospitality Holdings, Bristol District.
The name sits there clean and ordinary, white letters against a dark background.
But the memory is neither clean nor ordinary.
A narrow staircase with a red carpet too plush for the neighborhood. A gold-framed mirror near the bathrooms. Nico’s hand at your waist, not affectionate—guiding. Positioning. Men in expensive jackets laughing too softly upstairs while you waited at the bar with a drink you had not asked for.
Jason says your name softly.
You realize you have gone quiet.
“That one,” you say.
Barbara’s attention sharpens. “You know it?”
You nod once.
“Nico used to take me there.” Your voice is steadier than the inside of your chest. “Not often. Only when he had meetings he didn’t want near the usual clubs.”
Tim is already pulling up a deeper file.
“What did he call it?” Barbara asks.
You search the memory, letting it surface without letting it swallow you.
“Neutral ground,” you say finally. “He said nobody did business there unless they wanted everybody else to know they were still playing nice.”
Dick’s expression loses its humor.
Jason does not say anything.
His hand comes to rest against the edge of the console beside yours. Not touching you. Near enough that you can choose to close the distance.
You do.
Your little finger hooks around his.
The contact steadies without interrupting.
Barbara turns back to the map. “A neutral location tied to Moretti’s holding structure gives us exactly what we need. If Hood disrupts a transaction connected to Vesper, it reads like he found a business route. Not a personal one.”
Tim nods. “I can seed transfer data through three adjacent fronts. Enough to imply inventory movement without manufacturing anything that would pull innocent people into it.”
“And I,” Dick says, recovering just enough brightness to be himself again, “can be the extremely handsome distraction with cheekbones.”
Barbara closes her eyes briefly. “That is not an operational designation.”
“It should be.”
Jason ignores both of them, gaze still on you. “What else do you remember?”
The question lands gently.
No you don’t have to.
No attempt to wrap you in cotton and carry you out of the room.
Just trust that you know what you can give.
You look back at the screen.
“Back entrance off the alley,” you say. “No sign on the door. Staff smoked out there during private events. Nico never parked in front. He’d have someone drop us half a block away.”
Tim types it in.
“There was an office upstairs,” you continue. “He got angry once because I started walking up after him. Said the rooms up there weren’t for girlfriends.”
Jason’s fingers shift against yours.
Not tightening.
Just present.
“What night was busiest?” Barbara asks.
“Thursdays,” you say. “Late. After ten.”
Dick glances at the clock on the screen. “Convenient.”
Tonight is Thursday.
The room changes around that fact.
Not panic.
Commitment.
Barbara begins assigning roles before anyone needs to ask.
“Tim, route the financial breadcrumb through Vesper and one shipping subsidiary. Keep it plausible. Nothing too tidy.”
“Already on it.”
“Dick, you make noise on the south side. Nothing connected to Moretti. I want Hood’s supposed investigation to look wider than it is.”
Dick salutes. “One dazzling red herring, coming up.”
“Jason.” Barbara’s voice stills the air. “You hit the transfer connected to Vesper. You take records. You leave witnesses breathing and annoyed.”
Jason’s mouth curves without humor. “My specialty.”
“And you do not improvise because someone says the wrong thing about her.”
There it is.
The red line.
Jason’s gaze lowers for one second, then returns to the screen.
“I won’t.”
Barbara turns to you.
“You stay here tonight. With Sophia. Once the operation begins, movement from you creates noise we don’t need.”
It is practical. Straightforward. Not a cage.
You nod. “Okay.”
Jason glances at you, a question in the look.
You squeeze his finger once before letting go.
“I’m okay with that,” you tell him.
He believes you.
That is another thing that feels new.
⸻
By the time the meeting breaks, Sophia has apparently finished lunch, overthrown Damian’s initial tea-party restrictions, and convinced Alfred that dessert is a legitimate afternoon activity.
You find her in the kitchen with a smear of chocolate at the corner of her mouth and Ace stationed beside her chair in transparent hope.
“Mommy!” she announces when you walk in. “I got cake.”
“I can see that.”
“Damian got cake too.”
Damian sits at the island with a plate in front of him and the expression of someone enduring public slander.
“I was served against my will.”
Alfred sets another plate on the counter before you. “An ordeal, sir.”
Damian glares at him.
You smile, but your gaze drifts toward Jason as he stops in the doorway behind you.
He is already halfway elsewhere.
Not distant. Not withdrawing.
Preparing.
Sophia sees him and holds out her fork with a generous clump of cake balanced precariously on the end.
“Bite?”
Jason looks down at the black shirt he is wearing, then at the chocolate-covered fork.
You can see him calculate the disaster potential.
He takes the bite anyway.
Sophia giggles triumphantly.
Jason swallows and nods gravely. “Good cake.”
“It is,” she says.
For a second, he looks almost wrecked by the simple fact of her being happy.
Then he catches you watching, and the look changes. Settles.
He does not step away from it.
⸻
You find him in one of the smaller rooms off the Cave twenty minutes later.
Not the armory exactly. Not somewhere so dramatic. A preparation room lined with equipment cases and neatly folded black fabric, where Jason stands with his helmet on the table in front of him and checks each piece of his gear in methodical silence.
He hears you come in.
His hands still briefly over a holster.
“Hey,” he says.
“Hey.”
You close the door behind you.
Not for secrecy.
For a minute that belongs to the two of you.
“This could take a few hours,” he says.
“I figured.”
“Maybe longer if Moretti’s people decide to play dumb.”
“They will,” you say.
Jason huffs softly. “Probably.”
You step close enough to touch the edge of his jacket, smoothing down a fold that does not need smoothing.
“And if he follows the wrong trail?” you ask.
Jason looks down at your hand, then up at you.
“Then we know he bites.”
The answer should scare you.
It does not.
Not because you do not understand what it means, but because everything about this plan has been spoken aloud. The risk is not hiding in the dark anymore. It has shape. Roles. People carrying parts of it.
You curl your fingers into the edge of his jacket.
“Come back when it’s done,” you say.
Jason’s expression softens just enough to hurt.
“I will.”
He kisses you before the old instinct can tell him not to.
Not near the screens.
Not where anyone could interpret it.
Not for anyone but you.
His palm cups your jaw, warm even through the cold focus already settling into him. The kiss is brief but firm—something chosen, something he takes with him instead of leaves behind.
When he pulls away, his forehead brushes yours.
“Stay with her tonight,” he murmurs.
“I am.”
“And you?”
You understand the question under the question.
You nod. “I’ll be okay.”
His thumb brushes your cheek once.
Then he steps back and lifts the helmet.
The red mask takes his face, but not the moment.
Not from you.
⸻
Jason POV
The Vesper Room looks exactly like the kind of place men build when they want dirt to wear perfume.
Gold lettering. Black awning. No obvious security near the front, because obvious security suggests you have something worth defending.
Jason is not interested in the front.
He lands on the roof of the building opposite the alley and crouches low beneath a rusted sign, helmet optics pulling the narrow service entrance into focus.
Two smokers. One delivery van. One man standing too still to be staff.
Barbara’s voice comes through his comm.
“Tim’s package is in the network. Financial trace reads as weapons inventory routed through Vesper to an East End holding site.”
“Copy.”
“Nightwing makes contact in thirty seconds.”
Jason watches the alley.
Twenty-seven seconds later, a commotion erupts three districts south—police scanner chatter, a warehouse alarm, and Dick’s infuriatingly cheerful voice slipping through the encrypted channel.
“Operation Handsome Distraction is live.”
Barbara sighs. “I regret letting you name things.”
“Too late.”
Jason almost smiles.
Almost.
Then the Vesper service door opens.
A man in a dark suit steps into the alley with a metal case handcuffed to his wrist.
Jason’s focus narrows.
“Target moving,” he says.
Tim’s voice replaces Dick’s. “Case matches manifest dimensions. Whatever’s inside, it’s valuable enough they want it visible.”
“Good.”
Jason steps off the roof.
He hits the alley hard enough to make the man with the case stumble backward before he has time to pull a weapon.
The first guard reaches inside his jacket.
Jason catches his wrist, twists, and puts him into the brick wall hard enough to end the argument without ending him.
The second is slower.
Jason sweeps his legs out from under him and puts a boot to his chest before he can finish swearing.
The man with the case backs into the door, face blanching beneath the expensive suit.
“Red Hood.”
Jason tilts his helmet.
“Glad the branding’s working.”
“You’re making a mistake.”
“Yeah?” Jason reaches down, snaps the chain at the man’s wrist with a compact cutter, and takes the case. “Get in line.”
The man’s eyes flash. “You have no idea who you’re interfering with.”
Jason feels it then.
The old heat.
The impulse to grab him by the throat and ask him if Moretti knows what happens to men who go digging through the lives of women who have already survived enough.
He thinks of your hand open on the table.
Choose it on purpose.
He lowers the case to his side.
Calmly.
“Tell your employer,” Jason says, voice flattened through the modulator, “that if he’s moving guns through my city, he’s paying me a toll.”
The man stares at him.
He has heard the message.
Good.
Jason fires a smoke pellet into the alley concrete. By the time the haze clears, the case is gone and the witnesses are alive, angry, and carrying exactly the explanation he wants them to carry.
Barbara’s voice returns in his ear.
“Clean.”
“Too clean?” Jason asks.
A beat while she reviews feeds.
“No. You gave him ego and money. Men like Moretti understand both.”
Tim cuts in. “Traffic just started. Two messages out from Vesper security to adjacent channels. They are using the phrase ‘weapons route.’”
Dick whistles. “And the Oscar goes to the emotionally constipated man in the red helmet.”
“Shut up, Dick.”
“Welcome back, little wing.”
Jason moves across the rooftop line, metal case in hand, Gotham opening beneath him.
He should feel better.
He does not.
He feels the trap settle.
Which means it might work.
⸻
Moretti POV
The report reaches Moretti before midnight.
He reads it once.
Then again.
The man standing in front of his desk has a bruised wrist and a carefully controlled expression that tells Moretti humiliation hurts more than injury.
“Red Hood intercepted the transfer from Vesper,” the man says. “He took the case. Said if we’re moving weapons through his city, we owe him a toll.”
Moretti turns one page.
The false transfer record is neat.
Not too neat. That is important.
Multiple subsidiaries. A delayed shipment. A route that could have drawn a vigilante’s attention through nothing more interesting than greed and bad operational discipline.
It makes sense.
Across the desk, the man shifts. “We think he’s been tracking the weapons lane.”
Moretti sets the report down.
“We?”
The man clears his throat. “The operation. Our people.”
Moretti looks at him until he stops trying to sound useful.
Then he reaches for the thin folder lying beneath the report.
Her folder.
The one that had produced a ripple when touched.
He places it beside the Vesper file.
Two pieces of paper.
Two stories.
One very convenient explanation.
Too convenient?
Perhaps.
Or perhaps Red Hood had found a weapons operation, and the woman had never been anything more than incidental noise.
Moretti dislikes coincidence.
He dislikes dismissing it even more.
“Where was she?” he asks.
The man blinks. “Sir?”
“When Red Hood was making himself visible at Vesper,” Moretti says patiently, “where was the woman?”
“I— We weren’t tracking her.”
“No,” Moretti says. “You were not.”
The man pales.
Moretti turns his attention back to the files.
A weapons route was the obvious answer.
A personal attachment was a more interesting one.
He does not need to choose yet.
He moves her folder out from beneath the stack and places it beside the Red Hood report instead.
Not closed.
Not discarded.
Promoted.
The man at his desk shifts again. “Do you want us to follow Hood?”
Moretti’s mouth curves faintly.
“No,” he says. “He wants to be followed.”
He closes the Vesper report with one hand.
“Let him think we did.”
⸻
Reader POV
The Manor is quiet by the time Jason calls.
Not silent. Houses like this are never silent. Pipes settle in old walls. The wind moves through trees outside the windows. Somewhere upstairs, Titus shifts against the floorboards with a heavy sigh, refusing to abandon his post even in sleep.
You are sitting in an armchair beside Sophia’s bed, a book open but unread in your lap.
She fell asleep halfway through the second story, one small hand curled beside her face, completely unaware that several adults and at least two dogs have rebuilt the night around keeping her world ordinary.
Your phone vibrates once.
Jason.
You stand before answering, slipping into the hallway and pulling the bedroom door nearly closed behind you.
“Hey.”
“Hey.” His voice is tired, filtered through the aftermath of the helmet instead of the helmet itself. “She asleep?”
You glance through the narrow gap in the door.
“Out cold. Damian lost the tea-party negotiations, but he survived.”
A quiet laugh breathes through the line.
“Good.”
“How did it go?”
A pause.
“He took the trail.”
Your hand tightens around the phone. “That sounds like it should feel better than your voice says it does.”
Jason is quiet for a second.
“He’s smart,” he says finally.
You understand.
Taking the bait is not the same thing as believing it.
“But we moved first,” you say.
“Yeah.”
“And he doesn’t know what he thinks he knows.”
Another pause.
“No,” Jason says. “He doesn’t.”
You lean against the wall, exhaustion settling over you now that you have permission to feel it.
“When are you coming back?”
“Soon.” His voice lowers. “To the Manor, if that’s okay.”
Your eyes sting unexpectedly.
Not because he asked.
Because he did not assume.
“Yeah,” you say softly. “Come here.”
“Okay.”
The call ends.
You return to Sophia’s bedside and settle back into the chair, but you do not reopen the book.
A little while later, you hear the careful sound of footsteps outside the room.
Jason appears in the doorway in clean clothes, hair still damp from what must have been the quickest shower in human history. He looks exhausted. Bruised around the edges. Real.
You lift your hand without speaking.
He crosses the room and takes it.
Not out of fear.
Not because anyone is watching.
Because no one in this room has to pretend distance is the same thing as safety.
Jason lowers himself to the floor beside your chair, his shoulder resting against your knee, your fingers still folded together between you. On the bed, Sophia sleeps on, safe and soft and untouched by the shape of the night.
Outside these walls, Moretti is moving pieces.
Let him.
Tonight, Jason is here.
And the hand holding yours is warm.
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