#This was probably the Best hdywtdt that I have ever gotten and it was sooo satisfying

[quaxorascal]

So here’s the completed fic that I teased a couple of weeks ago of Taber killing the big bad of her backstory, bc this is probably as edited as I can possibly make it and I’m really happy w it

“How Do You Want to Do This?”, ~600 words

Taber’s head snaps up at the sound of snapping dogs a moment before Felix shouts “Backup’s coming!” Sabina is the one who acts first though: she’s off like the shots Felix fires from his pistol, ready to lend her knives to help fight off the Martarelli war hounds and guards he had warned them about.

Good. He’ll be safe.

That just leaves the Broker.

Aracelli had brought the Broker to his knees, and together Taber and Belasco were doing everything they could to keep him on the ground. In the time it had taken for Taber to look in Felix’s direction, Belasco had taken his opportunity to drive a dagger deep into the man’s back; poetic justice for a backstabber himself, as far as Taber is concerned.

He doesn’t cry out in pain, or even acknowledge that Belasco did anything to him at all. The sound he makes, instead, is low laughter. She looks him in the face and finds he’s already looking up at her, the fire of madness glowing behind his eyes.

“You think this changes anything?” he taunts. “You think this will stop anything? I’ve created a hunger in this world, a hunger that will consume it. If I burn” —he looks her directly in the eye— “the world will burn with me!”

“Belasco!” she cries as she turns her head to break eye contact with the Broker. Her companion doesn’t hesitate, producing another dagger and stabbing it into the base of the Broker’s neck. The blow makes the man’s body go limp and sag forward, as if bowing to Taber.

Against all odds, the Broker laughs once again, cackling like everything is still going in his favour. “And I promise, you will kneel one last time before you—“

She sucks in a breath through her nose, her vision tunneling on the Broker as she raises her axe—it blazes twofold with holy white light, from Ilmater’s blessing and from her own—high above her head. With a deep bellow, she swings the weapon back down—

The Broker’s face is hidden from her view, neck completely exposed, and yet still he talks, still he laughs—

This ends now! —

—and she cuts with the grim precision of an executioner’s blade first through the air, then through flesh. There is a dull thump against the ground as her axe embeds itself in the manicured lawn; then, a second thump right after the first, when the severed head hits the ground; finally, a third, with the impact of his body.

The head rolls across the grass after landing, revealing the maniacal glee contorting the Broker’s features in his final moment. Those wide-open eyes can’t see anything, that wide-open mouth can’t make any sound, she knows they can’t; and yet she can feel his gaze turning to Belasco first, then burning into her own soul in turn, before it finally moves on, and the head comes to a stop with one cheek against the ground. The leader of an empire of pain and suffering is dead.

After everything the Broker had done, every person he manipulated, every life he ruined for his own gain, he is finally no more than a dead body in two pieces.

She pants as if she’d just exerted herself a great deal, though her chest feels tight with the fear the Broker’s last promise instilled in her. He’s still laughing triumphantly, she swears, long after his head stops rolling.