As of yet not officially beta'd by anyone, but with a few revisions to make for easier reading ^^ Hopefully I managed to clear away any lingering confusion over some of the more unfamiliar terms. If you're still not sure what's what, leave a review letting me know what you don't get and I'll be happy to oblige you!

Glossary list at the bottom of the chapter ^^

Summary: Sakura, cursed to steal from her patients in exchange for the power to perform healing miracles, is unexpectedly caught by a noble who sets her with an interesting proposition….

Disclaimer: Naruto isn't mine, it's Kishimoto's, and I took several ideas from a number of Tamora Pierce's books (all of the Tortall-verse) so don't sue the authoress please ^^;

And now, on with the story!


Chapter 1: Caught

"Ugh," the girl muttered to herself, disgusted as she assessed her situation. The results of her analysis were grim.

She'd been caught.

That was what goaded her most; her skills were nigh on being Konoha street legend. Tourists who visited the city got told of the Trickster's Cure, a mysterious visitation that happened to the ill and ailing wherein they were healed of illnesses that medics had deemed impossible to fix. As payment, some object of worth was stolen from them, with the thief god's emblem left in its place. She'd slipped in and out of nobles' townhouses, merchant keeps, the Assassin's Guild (she was really proud of that one), even the palace. That she'd gotten caught here was just plain humiliating. Especially since she'd already gotten in here once already.

Damn Uchiha…

She'd been stripped.

Not inappropriately. That had actually surprised her a little but apparently the lord employed guards who did their tasks without copping a feel like so many of the men she'd encountered in her day-to-day life. They had, however, done a very thorough search and found all of the tools of her trade, including her second and third set of lock picks (she hadn't been able to smother the smug grin that had flitted across her face when one of the guards had whistled appreciatively upon the discovery of the last set), the wrist and ankle kunai, the various powders attached in pouches at her belt, and the senbon needles hidden in the hems of her outfit. Without them she was feeling more naked than if they had stripped her bare.

She'd been locked up.

That last one was pretty annoying too. She'd been hauled off, after being discovered and subdued, to a cell like a common criminal! It hurt her pride almost as much as being caught at her work. At least the cell was clean and dry. She might have been tempted to put up more of a fuss if she'd been chained up in a dungeon. As it was, one of the guards was already nursing what would become an impressive shiner by morning, and another wasn't going to entertain anyone in his bed for a few days at least.

Serves 'em right! She thought with a grim smirk, her thoughts slipping into the comfortable, unpolished street rats' cant she was accustomed to. More'n a few of 'em will be nursin' hurts by the time I'm out.

But even her mental bravado couldn't keep the grin from sliding off her face. There was little chance of her getting out. She was the Trickster's Cure. Even if she argued with the man for justice – she had healed in exchange for her filched trinkets – she had a pretty good idea that a thief would still be a thief to the city watch's Lord Provost, Hyuuga Hiashi. She would only have a Crown-issued criminal's death on Executioner's Hill to look forward to or, at best, exile from Konoha. An unpleasant prospect.

"Jiraiya was right," Sakura muttered to herself, unhappily slumping against the wall. "I've let myself get too dependent on my Gift." Her tutor in the master thief's trade would be furious when he found out she'd been relying on it to get her out of her stickier heists.

"Uuuugh," she groaned, already feeling boredom settling in. "If I can get outta this mess I'd gladly list'n to Jiraiya rantin'…"


Three hours later, the clanging of a door beyond her cell had her scrambling up, glad for anything, anything at all, to assuage her boredom. She didn't even care that the grim-faced guards were coming for her. Anything was better than the curst monotony she'd been suffering alone. The Gift made inaction nigh unbearable.

"Thank th' Trickster," she muttered as they hauled her out of the cell.

The guard on her left's lips twisted in a wry grin. "Save your breath, thief-girl," he said, eyes trained forward. "I doubt you'll want to thank the Trickster in a few. He's obviously not answering any of your prayers if you've gotten caught."

"Who says 'm not gettin' away later?" the girl grumbled rebelliously, but she shut up.

"We've brought her Lord Uchiha," the guardsman called out softly, rapping his knuckles against a hardwood door several minutes later. "Straight from the cells."

"Good, bring her in," a voice answered back, smooth and rich as a golden brandy.

Sakura, having been planning an escape during their trip here, was a little surprised to notice that she was now back in the same room she had been in the process of robbing when she'd been caught. She hadn't been paying much attention to their path because her plan had involved a window, several strips of fabric off her shirt, and one of her bootlaces. Both if the window had been a wide one.

"Hello, Trickster's Cure," her captor greeted her.

Hearing the title from his lips made her skin prickle with nervousness. She'd been hoping he would assume she was merely an average thief; she shouldn't have thought so considering she had healed him. But few people knew her as the Trickster's Cure other than her surrogate parents, Tsunade and Jiraiya. If she didn't get out of this alive, every one of them was going to be haunted by a seriously pissed off ghost

He caught the subtle change in her countenance with a gaze of bland curiosity.

Calling herself five kinds of stupid, she slipped on her nothing mask expression, shutting him off from her emotions as effectively as if she'd closed a door in his face.

"Hello, Lord Uchiha."

The Uchiha Lord raised a single eyebrow, dark eyes hooded. She had to hand it to him. His nothing mask was almost as good as hers. Even she was having a hard time reading him.

"So…the Trickster's Cure is a woman, not a myth," he said, slowly sauntering towards her, sable dressing gown draped loosely over his shoulders.

Sakura said nothing, aspen-leaf eyes drawing in the scene.

The room was elegantly furnished, as appropriate for a noble, especially a Lord. Her compulsion, her so called Gift, was making her fingers itch with the desire to take the delicately crafted lamp that cast the room in a golden light, the black-and-white marble chessboard by his bed, even the richly woven hangings that kept the winter's chill from seeping into the room through the stone walls. The desk looked as thought it got regular use; the Lord is a scholar…interesting, papers and books scattered messily over the surface. It was the only part of the room that wasn't scrupulously tidy.

Damn…I must have healed him just after he'd fallen asleep. No wonder he woke up when I tried to filch….

If she ever got out she'd remember to take better note of her surroundings. Considering the almost fastidious order in the room, she should have realized the untidy desk was a sign the Lord had been working late.

He stopped, merely five or so feet away, and she was finally forced to look at him.

He was a head taller than her, sleek and authoritative. She didn't need street gossip to know he was good with weaponry. His walk was both self-assured and predatory; dangerous to someone like her who lived by her wits.

If my Lord Provost decides to retire, he'd find a good replacement in this man… her brain thought idly. She really was trying too hard not to think of what would happen to her now that he knew she was the infamous Trickster's Cure.

He was dressed casually; it said plainer than words that he saw her as no threat. At least not to bodily harm. The dark dressing gown hung across his shoulders, accenting his slender – but well muscled – frame. He wore only a loose pair of dark breeches underneath, no shirt. Her eyes skimmed down then up, following the exposed flesh from collarbones to navel and back, wariness swirling in their emerald depths. And, with a final wrench of nerves, she looked up into his face.

He was pale in the lamplight, with surprisingly fine-boned features. She shouldn't be surprised; he was a noble after all. But in spite of sharp cheekbones that lined his face, he had a firm, stubborn chin, full but serious lips, and deep obsidian eyes.

Her teeth caught her lips in an unconscious gesture. She was intimately familiar with those eyes of his. She'd been healing them four hours ago.

"Appraising me?" he asked, voice silky.

Her chin jerked up as she leveled him with a glare. There wasn't a point in playing dumb, especially since he knew her for who she was, and she wasn't about to let him jerk her around like that. She hadn't been looking at him like something she'd hand over to a black market fence for coin.

His smile disappeared, but his eyes still gleamed with secret amusement.

Sakura's lips quirked in irritation.

"So…tell me about yourself," he said after a long silence. "Why do you do what you do? And how?"

"How d'you ask a healer how sh' does her work?" Sakura asked scornfully, speaking in street cant. "Y'wouldn't get it if'n you weren't a healer yourself."

"Most normal healers cannot heal the Assassin Guild's second-in-command of nerve damage that affected his entire left side, nor can they cure Lord Inuzuka of the Ashen Fever when he's on the brink of death," Itachi replied, the teasing note in his voice gone. "Don't be smart-tongued, girl. As your captor, I'd like some answers. An explanation on why I woke up to you standing over me in the dead of night to start with. And don't make me remind you that I control whether or not you end up on Executioner's Hill at the moment."

The girl's startling green eyes came up to glare furiously at him, but he saw the fear in them anyway though she tried to mask it. He didn't particularly care. Her glaring and angry was preferable to that emotionless mask he'd seen on her earlier.

"Th' hell, at leas' someone'll know why I did it," she muttered to herself, eyes flickering down before they trained back on him.

"I was born with my magic, for healing," she told him, fingers clenched behind her back as she stood, almost like she was reciting lessons, smiling in spite of herself when she noticed the surprise that blossomed on his face. "I wasn't always a street rat, milord. I can speak like an educated woman if I have to. Street cant's not strictly necessary."

"Cant?"

"Dialect," she answered, unclasping her hands to wave them in a "something like that" sort of gesture.

"Then why do you speak in this…street cant?" he asked curiously, a small frown marring the line of his brows as he rolled the unfamiliar phrase over his tongue.

Almost like he's tryin' out the taste of it, she thought with unbidden amusement as she shrugged in reply. "It's comfortable? But I figured it wasn't the best to tell my story in." Taking a clearing breath she continued, "I started out as a merchant's daughter. My family was thrilled when they learned I had the healing magic; it'd be a step up from trading for me. They even sent me to a Healers school near our house when I turned seven. And then the Trickster visited me."

Her green eyes grew pained, drawn inward as she remembered things that she would not speak of. "Don't believe me if you want, not many people are considered sane if they say the god of thieves has graced them with a visitation," she told him softly. "But he visited me all the same…and left me a Gift."

"A Gift?" Itachi asked, committing her words to memory. They would be interesting to peruse later; few individuals were gods-touched, even fewer by the Trickster. If he was going to hand her over to Lord Hiashi, he wanted to at least find out all he could about what had happened to her first. It was…interesting.

"He called it a Gift," Sakura said, a note of bitterness filling her voice, "But it's really my curse. In exchange for being able to heal people beyond what a normal healer is capable of, I need to steal something of value equal to the healing from my patient. He…sees the stealing as a sort of offering to himself. And the heal-and-steal is a compulsion. I can't control it."

Itachi raised an eyebrow.

"I'm serious!" Sakura insisted, feeling heat rise into her cheeks at his obvious disbelief. "The larger the healing and the bigger the stolen object, the longer I have until I need to set out again. But no matter what I've healed, within three weeks I'm back on the lookout for someone new to work on." Her eyes grew dim, and he watched them carefully, noting how they were the only part of her that truly let on to her emotions. Even in what he assumed was her more "relaxed" guard; she still kept a tight rein on her feelings.

"My parents threw me out. No merchant family thrives when a member has a thief's compulsion. They couldn't keep me." She sucked in a breath, vaguely surprised at how the telling still stung a little after all the years. "And then my surrogate parents found me. Tsu-My mother," she corrected hastily, she wasn't letting some noble – even one who had captured her and could easily send her off to the Crown's prison – find out who had raised her in case he decided to hunt them up too, "picked up teaching me healing magic where the school tutors left off, and my father taught me the foist's trade."

"Foist?"

"Master thief," she explained. "It's street cant."

"I see," and another raised eyebrow was his only response.

"When I turned fifteen I left them for Konoha. I'd cleaned out most of the lords near our town and I refused to steal from the poor. I've been here ever since." She inched closer to the marble game board on her left, hoping Itachi wouldn't notice how she eyed the gem encrusted chess pieces. She was already feeling the shivering tremors start in her arms from refraining from stealing more than four hours after a healing.

She's…shaking, Itachi realized, watching her surreptitiously glance from his chessboard to his face and back. Like some sort of withdrawal… The thought made him frown slightly. Now that he thought of it, she was exhibiting symptoms very much like withdrawal as she stood there, getting bolder and bolder as she eyed the game pieces. Well then…

He turned away, sighing as if he couldn't figure out whether or not to believe her story. In truth, he was rather confident of her honesty. His time spent researching the gods-touched, and studying the gods-touched prince of the realm, made her story…plausible. That she glowed in his sight within a golden corona of sparks, unlike every other individual he'd ever seen, even Prince Naruto, made him fairly convinced she wasn't lying. The fact that he was seeing a quiet seventeen-year-old with aspen-hued eyes and soft pink hair rather than a vague, indistinct blur made him certain. He'd been nearly blind when he'd gone to bed that night. Itachi turned back to face her once more.

Three of the chess pieces on the board were missing.

The girl was calmer and a tension he hadn't noticed before had left her shoulders.

Ah….

"I believe you, I think," he said, not letting on that he'd noticed the disappearance of his chess pieces. He could easily have them replaced or…. That's not a bad idea… His brain whirred with consideration as ideas began surging through his thoughts. Not…bad at all…. "You healed me. I've been told countless times there was no way I wouldn't be blind within the year, yet here I can see you as I could have when I was a boy. So I only have one question." He speared her with an obsidian-eyed gaze. "Why pink hair? It's so vibrant I'm surprised you haven't been caught yet…."

Sakura jerked back, a thrill of fear racing down her spine. Had she forgotten to rub the soot and oil mixture into her hair tonight? It was supposed to disguise her rose-hued locks and dull their shine so that she wasn't easy to spot in the dark. Her hand flew to her hair; it was the usual greasy texture as it was when she was working. Emerald eyes narrowed.

"You don't see like most people do, do you," she said blandly.

"No, I see things as they are. I suppose to others you look…different."

Sakura said nothing. If he couldn't see the mixture smeared in her hair, she wasn't about to tell him any foist trade secrets.

"Well then, I suppose there's only the question of what to do with you left now," Itachi said.

An icy chill wrapped around her gut, but before she could do more than take a breath to argue her captivity, he pressed on.

"Let me make you a bargain. Work for me."

She stared at him, utterly flabbergasted, unable to string a coherent sentence together. Half-formed thoughts writhed in her brain, all variations of "What?!"

"I think you might have guessed but, I have magic that allows me to see things as they truly are. It's a trait that happens occasionally in the Uchiha family that is invaluable to the Crown but…there is a downside. My powers wear away at my eyesight, even more so if I'm actively using my powers to see through spells and divine the truth; it will continue to eat away at my eyesight until there is nothing left. And then the power will leave me. You healed me of twenty-three years of gradual blindness," Itachi told her plainly. "I want you to do that for me again when my eyesight grows worse…as it invariably will."

Finally she found words.

"Why should I?" she snapped, surprising even herself at the sharpness of her tone. "You think because you have me captive I'd work for you like some hired mercenary?!"

"Perhaps."

Her anger flared.

"But I was hoping you could make a deal with me. My family's library is filled with books on magic, healing, curses, and even the gods-touched. Heal me and I will let you steal books from the family stores equivalent to your work. And I won't try to find out which ones you've taken. Half an hour alone in my family's magics library for every healing."

Sakura paused, every muscle tense. The temptation was overpowering. The Uchiha libraries were famous for the knowledge they held; she'd debated stealing books from other Lords' houses and the palace when she had been in to heal there, but even the Crown library couldn't compare to the one held by the Uchihas as far as volumes on magic were concerned. The Uchihas had always been Konoha's greatest mage family, since before there even was a Crown to swear fealty to. The tantalizing promise that something in this man's library could help her break the Trickster's hold on her was too much.

"And you'll let me free?"

"As long as you give me a way to contact you when I need healing, you needn't set foot in here until then," Itachi promised. "My Lord Hyuuga may disagree with me, but as Trickster's Cure you trade healings for your thefts. In my opinion it is as good a sale as that of any other Healer. You merely take something other than coin for your fee."

Sakura felt her heart constrict strangely as she mulled over his offer for a few minutes, more for show than any real need to consider. She'd already agreed to the deal in her mind as soon as Itachi had made his offer. Pushing away the queer sensation that had left her chest feeling tight, she really couldn't be distracted while dealing with a noble, she leveled serious emerald eyes at the Lord.

"Done."

Itachi smiled thinly. "Now, tell me your name, girl. I can't be calling you girl every time we meet."

Sakura quirked her eyebrows, frowning at the way he ordered her. "Sakura," she told him, shrugging.

"You may call me Itachi. Now please put back my chess pieces."

"What do you mean…Lord Itachi?" she asked coyly. She wasn't about to admit to any theft.

"Put them back, Sakura," he told her silkily. "Or would you rather not take books as your prize for tonight's healing?"

With a clatter they were back on the game board.

"Thank you," the lord remarked wryly, and led the way to the library.


Foist: master thief

Gift: magical talent

Provost: Hyuuga Hiashi, the man whose job it is to head the ones who catch lawbreakers

Street cant: streetrat dialect

Please review! Any comments are always appreciated by myself and the ItaSaku muse ^^