my name is stitched to your lips

i want to taste you again

If questioned, Jack would have said he was not avoiding the Tar Pits all this time so much as he was strategically making himself available elsewhere. The truth is the same either way (that he's been avoiding the place with all the determination of a kid hiding from a punishment) but his version way sounds prettier to his ego. Whatever the excuse, the time has finally arrived, and as he leaves The Ark (the galleon, that is) hovering over the swamplands, already his nose is wrinkling at the prospect of the cache he's about to collect.

Dressed down in old clothes he doesn't mind getting ruined - scuffed boots, pants that have frayed along the knees and a shirt with a few singe marks on it - and with no intention of lingering here longer than necessary - as he descends the rope towards the ground, there's no need for any extra layers despite the chillier than usual Flowerbirth. Humidity hugs his bare skin and makes his clothes feel heavy and damp, and his feet sink a few inches into the soft earth on his landing.

"Careful where you step, love," he mutters, voice immediately swallowed up by the swamp, as if it's hungry for their presence and keen to chew them up. "Cache should be hangin' over one of the tar pits close by. With any luck we'll lay eyes on it straight away an' we can get the fuck outta here."

like a secret or a sin

JACK

THE ARK

The Ark comes down after Jack with one hand curled around the rope, the other keeping his old shirt from catching too badly against the damp line. It hangs loose around despite how beneath it the leather of her trousers fits close to her legs, far too new still to have earned the sort of damage this place seems determined to hand out. Her boots disappear into the sludge as soon as she lands and the sensation makes something in her pull tight. The fog is thick enough to erase the edges of the world, and she can’t help but look out at the bubbling black stretch ahead and imagine the broad belly of her hull dragged down into it: tar swallowing her keel, climbing her sides, setting hard around her until there is nothing left to do but wait for the swamp to finish claiming what it has caught.

The thought is ugly enough that she shifts her footing immediately, as though that might dislodge it. "I can see why caches are placed out here," she says, her voice low and grim beneath the humidity. No one comes looking at a place like this unless they have a reason, and anyone foolish enough to wander through it by accident is unlikely to get close enough to find what has been hidden before the pits find them first.

Jack had offered to let her remain aboard, and while it had been a reasonable suggestion, probably the sensible one, standing safely on the deck while he went down alone hadn't felt like an option she could stomach. That doesn’t make the Feverlands any less revolting now that she is here, though.

Her mouth twists as another bubble breaks somewhere ahead of them, and, raising a hand, she draws a narrow stream of saltwater that ribbons out through the air, clean and bright against all that black, and she sends it arcing down into the nearest bubbling stretch of tar. For an instant, the surface reacts violently: the sludge spits and hisses around the water, hot enough to throw up a thin veil of steam, but it doesn’t loosen. It doesn’t thin. The saltwater vanishes into the blackness as though the pit has simply swallowed it whole, leaving a cold wind disturbing the dark waters of the Ark's mind.

everything I want you know i'm going to get it
whether it's your fame or your cableknit sweater
you might've done it first but I know i'll do it better

Code blatently stolen from queen of codes, Sky!