has anyone asked you about deja vu...................... i am very Interested and Invested in this one..............................................

ohh yesss. I've made SO little progress on chapter 4, but it's a rare fic where I have basically the entire story planned out, so here's a scene from chapter six. featuring my favorite 1940s film cigarette motif, anachronistically slotted in there considering this takes place in the mid 1700s, but what can you do XD

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They fall together lazily, after, Dream leaning against Hob’s shoulder, Hob’s leg slung over his as they lean against the headboard. Dusk is falling, the room in shadows now as the sun has long since traversed over the roof. Dream studies the play of dim light over Hob’s shoulders, the softening of all his features in the shadows. The way their skin sticks together in the summer heat, almost too hot and tacky, and the way the faint breeze through the open window flutters the curtains and the long strands of Hob’s hair. He runs an indulgent hand over Hob’s chest, down over his stomach and across his thigh, reading it all anew like he hasn’t just had Hob all over him. He is beautiful to touch, Dream thinks, but to do so carves a little hole of melancholy in his heart. Each brush of skin is like an echo, a memory calling to him across time whose origin point is distant now. Concentric ripples on a still lake, the thrown stone long gone under the water, and its thrower, too. Hob’s found some cigarettes in the nightstand drawer, and slants a smile sideways at Dream as he sticks two of them in his mouth to light, and as Dream keeps touching him lightly. “Am I pleasing to you?” “Yes,” Dream says, honestly, and Hob chuckles. “Good.” He strikes a match, the flame flaring brightly in the dark, and lights both cigarettes. Meanwhile, Dream watches the movement of his hands. Hob takes one of the cigarettes from between his lips and holds it up to Dream, and Dream takes with his teeth, Hob’s eyes on him all the while. The tobacco is acrid on the back of his tongue when he lets himself taste it — which he does, because whatever Hob would give him directly from his own mouth, he will have. Hob lets out his own breath of smoke, the breeze catching it and whistling it further into the room before it can linger. “You don’t strike me as a heavy smoker.” “I am not,” Dream concedes. “And yet.” Hob drapes his free arm around Dream’s shoulders, stroking up and down Dream’s arm idly with his thumb. “Getting a taste for it?” “Perhaps.” “Perhaps,” Hob echoes. He tips his temple against Dream’s so they’re breathing the same air, the same smoke. “Careful. It can be habit-forming.” Dream takes another inhale of smoke into his nonexistent lungs. “I am aware.” “Hard to break,” Hob stresses, close enough now that his lips nearly brush Dream’s. “One would think it best not to start at all,” Dream says, as he takes another long breath in, and almost feels the tang of it in his chest like he were truly breathing the way Hob is. “Bit late for that,” Hob says, though he doesn’t sound horribly chagrined about it. He tilts his head to catch Dream’s eye, and smiles, that warm, confidential Hob smile, like everything spoken is a secret between them, and it makes Dream want to whisk him away to the Dreaming to keep him forever, or twist his form back into Eleanor so he can have his husband again, or simply drop the façade entirely and see if Hob could possibly love him like this as Dream. And he does none of these things.