ATEEZ Imagines

Wooyoung ✦ The Hourglass | Pirate AU

The idea for this was brought on by me reading ATEEZ lore in the diary versions of my fever albums back in March 🥴
If you don't know the lore, you might be a little confused, but I'm sure you'll enjoy the story anyway!

Word count: 7,921

DO NOT read or interact if you're under 14

It had been months since you last saw them. Your friends. The boys you'd grown so close with over the past year. The ones that felt like home.
They were home.
Then, they disappeared.

Like many other things in your life, they were here for only a brief moment, leaving far too soon. Unlike the drifting people that weave in and out of your life, your eight close friends had seemingly disappeared and you didn't know where they went. It's almost like they vanished from existence. You missed them all dearly, but you missed Wooyoung the most. He was always so cheerful, easygoing, and full of effervescence. Like the others, he enjoyed cutting up and joking around, always messing with you or one of the other guys. You missed that. What you would give to hear one last teasing comment.

Standing alone in the middle of the abandoned metal building you used as a hangout, you reminisced on good memories and stress-free times. A time where you could all forget about the dismal aspects of your pathetic lives and just be in the moment. You found yourself coming to this place often. You weren't sure why, but you found yourself being drawn here, pulled by some invisible force. All you ever did was walk around the empty space, looking back on memories that were now ghosts from the past, haunting you.
Your fingers trace absentmindedly along the dusty lamp that sits atop a stack of wooden pallets used as a makeshift table. A baseball bat lay propped against a stack of crates and an abandoned skateboard sits idly on the dirt floor. The couch and other worn out furniture had been left behind like everything else in the building.
Everything was left as it was, as if time was frozen.

As you moved about the building, you noticed boot prints in the dirt floor of the warehouse, one's that were't there previously. The only people in that warehouse were you and your eight friends, and they hadn't been around for quite some time.
Curiosity got the best of you and you ended up following the footprints outside. They overlapped at some point, first leading to a cluster of boot marks imprinted in the dirt just outside the entrance, then going away from the building.
Judging by the multiple shoe prints outside the entryway, you concluded that whoever the tracks belonged to was standing just outside the door for an unknown period of time.

Someone was watching you.

You continued moving beside the tracks until you arrived at a grassy area where they ended. That's when the sound of leaves rustling nearby caught your attention. Bushes that dotted the edge of the tree line rustled in the wake of someone running through them.
Whoever was in the warehouse had been lingering nearby.
A small voice in the back of your mind told you to let it go and get out of there, but a louder voice told you to run into the woods.
You chose the latter.
Dead sticks and leaves crunched under your shoes as you trekked through the dense undergrowth of foliage and vines, unsure of which way to go.