Finn returned before dawn with five pigeons strung on an old leather strap. She felt pretty embarrassed of her offering. The pigeons were easy to hunt. They were slow, rotund birds that were very cute and seemed not to possess an instinctive fear of people. It felt cheap to go after them, but they were so big and easy to approach that it was hard not to.

Like before, Adi was impressed with what Finn considered to be a paltry showing. She took the birds over to their small fire and immediately began to pluck them before questioning Finn about how the scouting had gone.

After letting Finn finish her story, Adi's eyebrows were so low and stormy that they almost obscured her glittering dark eyes.

"God, Finn, what were you thinking?" she growled.

"I don't think I was thinking," Finn grimaced.

"What if they had caught you!?" Adi shouted.

Finn winced, glad that she had left out the bit where the human men nearly had caught her.

"I was just curious," Finn mumbled.

Adi pulled the next handful of feathers out violently and gave Finn a dirty look.

"If you're going to be the one sneaking into the human settlement, you're going to have to be more careful than that," Adi growled.

"Yes, ma'am," Finn sighed, bowing her head the same way she would to a grandmother giving her a good tongue lashing.

Adi sucked her teeth at the gesture, but otherwise didn't respond for a while, focusing on cleaning the birds. She didn't speak again until they were all cleaned and spitted on the same long stick.

"We should talk about how you're going to approach the town," Adi said thoughtfully.

"Yeah," Finn agreed, nibbling on a bit of dried sweet potato to cut the edge of her hunger. "We have some options on how to do it and what to focus on. So, we should definitely talk it over."

"What do you feel we should focus on?" Adi asked, her eyes sharp and determined in the blue light of near dawn.

Finn chewed for a moment as she put her thoughts together. "If we're going to find the caravan, I'll need to prioritize getting information in town. Even if they didn't go through the town to restock, they probably passed close enough that someone heard about it."

Adi nodded in agreement, so Finn kept going.

"The other priority we could focus on is figuring out where we are geographically. I should probably try to do that anyway, but it's going to be tough to do without making myself look like suspicious.

"I could also try looking for better gear for us. That would also be risky, though. If I tried to barter for new goods, that would invite a certain amount of scrutiny. And, if I tried stealing things, then I run the risk of getting caught," Finn finished.

Adi frowned down at her hands, rolling the options over in her head. Finn didn't envy her the responsibility of deciding. Finn would do whatever Adi wanted, but deciding what to focus on sounded like a nightmare.

"Okay, I'll need to think on that. What do you feel our options are for how to approach the town?" Adi asked after a moment.

"Well," Finn sighed, tilting her head side to side. "I could tuck my ears into my hair and cover my arms and legs, but I worry that I would still look pretty unusual by human standards. I'll have to use the rain cloak to hide my appearance. But, at the same time, walking around in a rain cloak in the middle of the day is going to make me look just as strange," Finn thought aloud.

"So, we could try waiting for it to rain, but..." Finn glanced up at the clear cloudless sky above them. She had considered themselves lucky that it hadn't rained while they were lost in the woods, but just then the clear skies were a little inconvenient. "We could try making me especially dirty and nasty looking and then people might assume that I'm just half wild from living in the woods all the time. Maybe then they'd be willing to brush off some weird idiosyncrasies, like always keeping the hood up on my cloak?" Finn wondered aloud.

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"If it's our only option, we'll have to do it," Adi grumbled, rubbing at her forehead.

Finn nodded in agreement. She hadn't been able to think of any other options herself while she was wandering through the woods. But if Adi agreed with her, at least her ideas weren't that bad.

"We also need to decide on when I'm going to try and enter the town. Entering during the day would be more normal, but would also make me easier to see," Finn said thoughtfully. "Night would make it easier to move around without attracting attention, but depending on the culture, people may not go out much at night. It's kind of a dice roll about which one would make me look less strange."

Adi grunted in agreement, still frowning, though now her frown was pointed at the pigeons roasting on the spit. She pulled the stick off the fire, sticking it straight into the ground, the roasted birds still crackling and leaking grease onto each other.

"We should let them cool down for a second," she explained, before grabbing a sharpened stick and beginning to poke around in the coals at the edge of the fire. Finn watched curiously. After a bit of poking, Adi came up with something round and blackened stuck to the end of her stick. She shook it off her stick with a few sharp flicks and onto a bed of leaves beside the pigeons before she began fishing for more. When she was done, she had a pile of four round black things steaming on the leaves.

"What are those?" Finn asked once Adi sat back, apparently done with the cooking for the time being.

"Sweet onions," Adi responded with a sly grin.

Finn's eyebrows went up, and she leaned a little closer to the pile of round black things, sniffing. They did smell like onions. It made her mouth water, though she had never considered herself a fan of onions before then.

"Why don't we split the difference between your two options," Adi said, changing the subject back to planning. "You could go to town at dusk, right before night falls. That way you can enter town normally, but stay for the night if you have to."

"Oh!" Finn exclaimed, sitting up straight. "That's a good idea."

Adi smirked, looking fondly at Finn before gesturing at the almost decadent looking pile of food. "Should be ready to eat now," she said, while handing Finn a pigeon and onion both.

Finn had been ashamed to bring home pigeons, but Adi had a gift for cooking. The bird was crispy, fatty, moist and delicious. The onion, once Adi showed her how to peel the outer layer away, was soft and sweet inside.

"It's sweet!" Finn exclaimed in surprise at her first bite.

"It's a sweet onion," Adi laughed, her husky voice rolling over Finn like a caress.

"I expected it to taste like an onion, though," Finn defended herself with a blush.

"If you cook them slowly, their natural sweetness comes out," Adi explained, taking a big bite out of her own onion and moaning appreciatively.

Blushing, Finn had to look away. She took another big bite out of her pigeon and tried not to replay that moan over and over again in her head, but it was a losing battle.

For a while, both of them focused on polishing off two pigeons and two onions each. Afterward, Finn felt almost painfully full again, but the food had been too delicious to pass up.

Finn and Adi walked together the short distance from their campsite to the little trickling waterfall they had washed their clothes and each other at just a few days ago. Together, they used a tiny sliver of soap to clean the grease from the pigeons off their hands and face.

"I think you should try to get up before the sun goes down and start hunting," Adi said as she flicked water off her fingertips. "Try and get as much wild game as you can. When the sun starts going down, you can head straight to town."

"Sounds good," Finn agreed, wiping her wet hands on her already stained shirt.

"Finn," Adi said seriously, stopping Finn from walking back to camp with a gentle hand looped around her wrist. Finn turned back to her, eyebrows raised. "If things get dangerous," Adi frowned, her grip on Finn's wrist tightening. "You're more important than whatever is in that town. Whatever happens, the top priority is for you to come back to me safe and sound. Okay?"

Adi's expression was intense, the first rays of dawn lighting up her skin and hair with red and gold. Finn felt caught, her breath stuck in her chest, her feet rooted to the ground.

How was she supposed to respond to that? The mission was everything. It always had been, for as long as Finn could remember. No one had ever tried to tell her differently.

But that wasn't the case with Adi. She really believed Finn was worth more than a successful result. God, Finn's heart hurt.

"Okay," Finn croaked, forcing herself to nod.

Adi nodded back firmly. She let go of Finn's wrist, but only so that she could weave her fingers between Finn's. She gave Finn's hand a squeeze and lead the way back to camp, Finn stumbling behind her like a fool.

They held hands all the way back to their small campsite, all the way to their bed of leaves, to laying together facing one another under the crooked limbs of their tree and the steadily lightening sky.

Adi pressed kisses to Finn's knuckles, holding her hand against her plush lips until she fell asleep. Her sleeping breath tickled against the back of Finn's hand. Finn curled close to Adi and tried to push her feelings down.

Adi was sweet. Adi was kind. She was also decisive and determined. She cared about the people she considered hers, and obviously she thought Finn was one of them. But, Finn had to keep her head above the water. Adi wasn't working with all the information, and she wouldn't act the way she did if she knew who Finn really was. Finn had to keep reminding herself of that.