Divine Universe

Disclaimer: I do not own the naruto franchise, or any of its characters or themes.

It had been a while since Team 7 had gone to a hotspring, and Naruto was cheering the place down as they entered the facility. Sasuke and Sakura rolled their eyes.

"Shut up, Naruto! You're so damn noisy!" Sakura hissed at him, but he didn't stop. Kakashi walked towards them from the front desk, his ecchi book in front of his nose. The secretary started to say something else, but Naruto interrupted loudly.

"Awesome, a hotspring! Last one in is a rotten egg!" Naruto cheered as he dashed away to the boys' changerooms, Sasuke and Kakashi walking behind him.

Sakura waved them goodbye, then sighed, walking towards the girls' changerooms. It would be nice to have a girl on the team: she was always alone at hotsprings.
Slowly she undressed and folded her clothes neatly into the basket. She washed herself off at one of the small shower stations, then wrapped a towel around herself and stepped through the curtain to the hotsprings. To her surprise, it was completely empty.

"I guess nobody's using the hot spring right now." she murmured to herself, peering around in the steam.
To be fair, they weren't exactly in a city: their mission in the Hidden Cloud had finished two days ago, and they were on the road back home when they'd spotted the tiny hot spring building. The secretary, at least, had looked surprised to see visitors.

Happy she wouldn't feel self-conscious at all, Sakura slipped out of her towel and into the warm water with a contented sigh. She wondered if the boys were alone, too. She giggled, fully appreciating that there was no-one else with her, and floated on her back, looking up at the pink sky.
It was still quite early for a sunset, she thought pensively as she slowly floated towards the back of the large pool. The air was cool, giving her goosebumps on her front. She floated still further away from the entrance, smiling as her long pink hair swirled around her and she traced her fingers up her sides.

"Sakura?"

She sat up abruptly, sank, coughed, staggered in shock: Kakashi was standing just a few feet away from her, looking surprised.

"S-Sensei!" Sakura exclaimed, crouching down in the water, cursing herself, not only for leaving her towel so far away, but for being so shameless when she thought she was alone. She met Kakashi's eyes warily: he had almost certainly seen her completely naked a few seconds earlier.

"What are you doing on this side of the pool?" Kakashi asked.

"I'm on my side!" she exclaimed indignantly, feeling ridiculous, crouched on her knees like a monk. "You're the one on the wrong side!" she said, pointing a finger at him. He frowned slightly, glanced around. Sakura couldn't help it- she smiled: Kakashi-sensei even wore his mask in a hotspring.

"Look. The secretary didn't tell us- the fence doesn't go all the way." he said, pointing back towards the way they'd came. He was right: about ten feet earlier, the dividing fence stopped, yellow construction tape slung over it. Now that the initial shock had faded, embarassment hit Sakura like a brick.

"W-Well, they should put signs up!" Sakura exclaimed hotly, not meeting Kakashi's eyes. "I can't even believe... What if you'd been a sexual predator...? And what if Sasuke saw me, then what the hell would I do...? Goddamnit, who does this to people!" Sakura exclaimed, facing away from Kakashi as she stood up and vented. She wasn't really that angry; she just didn't want him to see her blushing.
It was so much worse, of course, because she wasn't blushing because he'd seen her naked. She was blushing because she had hardly been able to keep her eyes off his body.

A tingling excitement had warmed her stomach, even as she was spluttering in shock, as her eyes ran over the muscular chest, the lean, strong arms, the toned stomach that her sensei hid under his black longsleeve. Not to mention he either didn't notice or didn't care that the waterline was well below his hips, right at the height that those sexy men in magazines seem to wear their underwear- so you can't see anything, but God you want to. Drops of water dripped off his shoulders, ran down his stomach, and Sakura had had a fleeting, ridiculous sense of jealousy. Because she wanted to touch him, too.

"Sakura-" Kakashi reached out and patted her head awkwardly.
Sakura bit down on her bottom lip painfully: his touch had sent a very painful shock through her, like an overdose of electricity. She turned around, remembering too late that she should have bent down again. What Kakashi saw, even if it was for a brief moment, made his mind go blank.

Sakura's long, wet hair hung in streams, fanning over her shoulders and hanging in curtains down her chest. Her stomach was pale like moonlight, and even covered by her Godiva-like hair, it was clear that her nipples were very much erect. Her face was flushed, warm from the onsen steam, her green eyes hazy above her mouth, whose lips were parted, the bottom one swollen and red.
A thousand days passed in the two seconds it took her to realize what he was seeing. She flushed even more and looked down at the water, as though willing it to raise itself up to cover her. Her knees were locked, refusing to bend. And so she stayed standing, her eyes fixed on the water. Kakashi looked away too, up to the sky, although his mind was still racing, re-creating and adoring once again what he'd just been looking at.

"Kakashi-sensei, I think Naruto's fainted, 'cuz of the steam." Sasuke's voice came from the boys' side, back by the changerooms. His voice jerked them both awake.

Sakura plummeted into the water like a stone and Kakashi quickly went back the way he'd come. Sakura followed suite, swimming like a maniac back to her towel. Her mind was both blank and buzzing at once. Shock at herself, at him, at everything was overwhelming her, and she soon leaned back against one of the cool, smooth rocks lining the edge of the hotspring to rest.
Sasuke's voice had sent a lightning bolt of horror and confusion ricocheting through her, not just because she'd fogotten he was there, but because she had seen Kakashi-sensei almost fully naked... and she had liked his body better than Sasuke's.

What is happening to me? Sakura felt like pleading with the heavens.
She barely knew herself any more; why had she been so attracted to Kakashi-sensei's body? Why hadn't she stayed under the water? Why had he not looked away at once? As she clambered out of the hotspring and wrapped her towel around herself, she couldn't help but wonder what Kakashi was thinking.
Because she knew he'd looked at her. He had looked at her in a way nobody had ever looked at her before. And as much as she tried to deny it, she knew she had liked it.

She had liked it in a way that scared her as it excited her, and she knew what she'd be dreaming about for the next while.