#this took so long to format on tumblr agsjdjkdhd bc i have to readd all the italics and extras spaces and everything ugh

[julie-and-the-himbo-ghosts]

Sometime You Gotta Lean On Someone Else: Chapter 2

Chapter 2 is here!! Sorry for everyone who’ve been waiting this whole time, I’m a slow writer lol. But maybe a much longer chapter makes up for it

Words: 3,679

Content warning: mild violence - Willie fights and knocks out a few dudes and it's about half of the chapter so I describe it pretty detailed, so if that's too much for you, you can skip to the line “He turned around to see every single one of the hostages staring at him slack-jawed.” Also some swearing, just like the last chapter.

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Chapter 1

Chapter 2: Be Gay, Fight Crime

Willie thanked whatever higher power that was up there that the bank had a back alley. There were so many ways it all could’ve gone if they hadn’t had a back alley, but they shook the thought out of their head, replacing it with just Alex, Alex, Alex.

With his bike leaning up against some nasty wall, he emptied the contents of his duffel as fast as he possibly could without dropping them everywhere. Inside: a pair of his good grippy gloves; a baggy hoodie with his little skateboard design on the back; loose black pants; one of those ski masks that only left space for ski goggles uncovered; a big roll of duct tape; and his stickers with the same design as his hoodie. What they affectionately referred to as their “Be gay, fight crime” gear or, if they were feeling basic, just their Spy Bag.

He just really hoped the bank had a back door he could get through.

There had to be someone - some higher power, ancestors, the OG ally the Universe, whoever - up There looking out for him, because somehow he managed to find a backdoor into the bank that was unlocked and unblocked by bank robbers. If he was going to be honest, he didn’t know if he should be thankful that the bank had such bad security or if he should consider suing them for emotional trauma.

Pushing possible lawsuits aside, he silently slipped inside the bank and made his way toward the bathrooms, where he ditched his now-empty duffel bag and slipped his tools into his pockets.

Well, ‘tools’ was being generous, he’d admit. It was really just his duct tape and his little skateboard stickers he specifically made so he could have a Vigilante Signature™, before he was nicknamed the Highland Park Vigilante and was just Willie, the anonymous guy in baggy black clothes just helping people he saw in danger, who was just starting out as a vigilante and wanted a cool signature.

As they crept down the hall, they could hear voices - the robbers, they assumed. They started out muffled and unintelligible, but as he got closer, he could begin to make out some of their sentences.

“Man, let’s go,” One of them said, his voice accented like a guy from those old mafia movies. They decided to call him Jersey. “This is taking way longer than practice; the cops are gonna get here soon.”

It took them a second, but they finally realized the robbers were walking toward him, and he pressed himself against the wall. Shit, shit, shit. One guy they could handle well enough. Two? Two was pushing their luck.

“We’re going as fast as we can,” A second voice responded, and they just barely stopped themself from sighing in relief. It was just a patrol with a walkie-talkie.

“Hurry faster,” Jersey replied.

“Shut up and do your job,” Growled the robber on the walkie-talkie - Radio Man, to them. “We had to tie up more hostages than we expected, and Marv found one in the bathroom, so it’s taking longer than we thought.” Their breath hitched. Marv. A hostage in the bathroom. So the robber who dragged Alex from the bathroom had a name. “Quit whining about the time and make sure no one’s wandering around the halls. And don’t radio us unless it’s urgent.”

“Fine, asshole,” Jersey grit out. The radio went from static to silent, and the sound of their heartbeat filled their ears. Jersey rounded the corner, and Willie waited until he was all the way into the hallway before they sprang out of their position against the wall.

“What the—” They heard the robber start, and they kicked him in the stomach before he could reach for his gun or radio. Jersey stumbled back, but didn’t fall over, and quickly recovered. He swung at them - too wide, they noticed, and too easy to dodge - so he ducked his head back and caught his arm with their own. Before Jersey could take his arm back, they followed it up with a jab straight into his nose. While Jersey reeled back, they swung their other fist into his chin with his left hook, finally knocking him out for good. When he finally slumped to the floor, they snatched their duct tape out of their pocket and wrapped his wrists up securely before ditching him in a nearby closet.

Willie pocketed Jersey’s radio as well, and then took off down the hall, deeper into the bank.

~~~

The bank was practically a maze, he realized, and he added the fact that he accompanied Alex here all the time to the list of things he was thankful for.

Alex. Just the thought of him overtook the adrenaline racing through his veins from taking down Jersey with the cool rush of fear. This wasn’t just any job - there were actual people in danger, Alex included, and - if he was being scarily honest - he didn’t actually know if he was okay. Anything could’ve happened after he hung up the phone, and the thought, the thought, of Alex being anything other than okay made him want to curl up and cry.

But he couldn’t because Alex was in danger, and curling up on the floor didn't help him, didn't help Alex, and didn't help the other hostages in the bank. The only people it did help were Jersey, Radio Man, and their buddies.

He steeled himself and moved faster down the halls and towards the hostages - towards Alex.

~~~

When the maze of halls ended, it dropped them off in a little doorway next to the bank tell counter - close enough for them to duck behind the counter without anyone seeing them, but accessible for customers to use to go to the bathroom, for example.

They rolled behind the counter from the doorway and stuck their head up so they could peek through the glass that would usually separate the tellers from the customers.

The blinds on the front windows of the bank were drawn, and the hostages were all clustered together on the opposite end of the tellers’ counters. About ten of them, they estimated, including Alex, sticking out from the others with his bright blond hair, pink shirt, and black fanny pack. They had to freeze to stop themself from just running over there and releasing him. They had to deal with the robber guarding them first, and then Radio Man, and then any other robbers that might be there.

They couldn’t see the robber guarding them right off the bat, and they must have peeked their head up a little too high looking for him because one of the hostages snapped their head around and locked eyes with them.

And naturally, with their luck, it was Alex.

Alex looked panicked - well, more panicked than he was just being a hostage - and Willie put a finger up his mouth as if to shush him from the other side of the room. Alex, thankfully, looked like he got the message, and he snapped his eyes away from theirs.

With that disaster averted, they continued to scan the room for the guard. With this amount of energy they needed to spend looking for him, his name needed to be Waldo. Waldo was at the front, practically dead in front of Willie, pulling the blind away from the window to look through.

Seizing the distraction, Willie vaulted over the counter - careful not to knock his legs on the glass - and ran silently across the room, and he almost made it.

Waldo turned around when he was just feet away from him, and he swung his gun towards them.

Fuck.

It was a cliche, they knew, but it felt like everything moved in slow motion for a few moments. Willie saw the gun swinging towards their face, the pull of the trigger, the bullet shooting out of the gun. They stopped dead in their tracks and threw their weight backwards. Willie saw the bullet shoot towards them and fly over their face almost in slow motion, as if it was moving through jelly instead of air. The shot was nearly deafening, but the momentum of the sudden stop and throwing their weight back caused them slid on the ground like a baseball player sliding into home base - except, instead of sliding into home base, they slammed into Waldo’s legs and bowled him over. He crashed to the ground, and the gun clattered out of his hands and onto the floor. They rolled to the side and grabbed it, pointing it at Waldo before he could get himself off the ground.

He hoped he didn’t seem as unsure on the outside as he did on the inside, because shit, he hated guns. Just levelling a gun at Waldo - a robber who took Alex hostage and shot at them - made his stomach roil. There was a reason he ran around town as a vigilante instead of joining the police force. Well, multiple reasons, but he didn’t have the time to list every single one.

“Don’t move,” He told Waldo.

“Who the hell are you?” The man just said in response, his voice incredulous.

They recognized that voice.

They didn’t know him or anything dramatic and cliché like that, but they’d heard it before. Only two words, to be fair, but it was a memorable two words.

Waldo was the guy that dragged Alex out of the bathroom.

A surge of rage shot through him. He knew it was irrational and unreasonable and downright dangerous, but he was pissed. He’s the reason Alex is in danger.

“Give me your arms,” He growled. He didn’t consider himself an angry person, not in the slightest - he might get irritated, sometimes, but never really pissed. There was a very short list of special offenses that got him pissed.

He could add ‘endangering Alex’ to that list, then.

Waldo - no, Asshole now - put his hands up in a defensive pose. “Okay, okay. Don’t shoot.” He slowly outstretched his arms, fingers linked. Willie reached into his pocket to grab his duct tape - gun still trained on Asshole - and used his teeth to pull up the edge of the tape. They carefully slipped the gun into another one of their pockets - thank God for cargo pants - and started wrapping Asshole’s wrists in tape.

But Asshole had another idea.

Using his clasped hands like a fist, he swung his hand at their face and caught them in the jaw. They reeled back a step from the force of the swing, then shot their elbow out and smashing it into the side of his jaw, quickly following it up with a kick to his stomach and another punch. Asshole collapsed to the ground, out like a light, and he finished wrapping his arms and legs in duct tape.

He turned around to see every single one of the hostages staring at him slack-jawed. Some were incredulous, like they were thinking “What?? The hell??” - not some of their fans, then. Others had more of a shocked, wow-I-just-got-saved-from-a-bank-robber-by-the-Highland-Park-Vigilante look, the one that always made him smile a bit. There were two kinds of people.

Well. Not if they counted Alex (and they always did).

Alex…Alex was a little harder to read; his emotions weren’t in plain view like the rest of them. You’d think he would be the easiest to read, being his completely hopeless crush neighbour, but Willie just could not read tone or emotion sometimes. They were many an English teacher’s nightmare kid - he spent countless free periods and lunches in high school with English teachers desperately trying to teach them, but none ever succeeded. There was a reason he used to be a chemistry major, and it was because chemistry was straight hard facts and not that ‘open to interpretation’ chaos.

Anyways. Alex.

Alex looked shocked like the others, of course, but there was also a hint of admiration - and was that a blush? - that made their cheeks heat up, too. He’d never been more grateful for the mask covering his cheeks.

It might’ve been a little weird, they realized later, the way they just stared at Alex for a bit - okay, a lot - longer than normal, especially as the Highland Park Vigilante and not his friendly neighbourhood he/they.

Sirens pierced the quiet, low and muffled in the distance, and that sent another little shot of adrenaline through his veins. Shit. He had to get out of there and change and get away from the scene, not to mention Radio Man, who was still loose in the building somewhere and was definitely going to start to hear the sirens soon.

They moved to rush out of the room but stopped midstep and went in Alex’s direction instead. As they got closer, Alex’s mouth dropped open slightly with a hint of incredulity that made them smile. Digging around his pocket, he grabbed one of his several vigilante signature stickers that he carried around to leave his mark and pressed it into Alex’s hand with a dramatic wink.

If Alex hadn’t been blushing before, he definitely was now, with that dark pink tinge to his cheeks and his mouth gaping open even more than before.

They let themself revel in the warm, bubbly feeling of pleasure making Alex blush gave them while they jogged out of the room.

~~~

Willie opened the door to the bathroom - the same one he ditched his empty duffle bag in before he took down all the robbers - slowly, checking to see if there was anyone in the hallways before walking out.

He’d found and knocked out Radio Man just as the cops arrived at the scene. Instead of having to negotiate with several robbers with hostages, they found, the hostages walked out of the bank, free and unharmed, as soon as they arrived. He laughed to himself, thinking of the confusion those cops were facing - before they found out he was behind it, of course.

With just their head peeking out the door, he scanned the hallway, looking for any cops or stray people walking around that would almost certainly find some random guy from off the street carrying a duffle bag inside a bank-turned-crime-scene right after a robbery foiled by a vigilante extremely suspicious. So really, he was just on the lookout for anyone.

There was someone moving down the hall, but he didn’t know if it was fortunate or unfortunate for him that the someone was Alex.

He quickly threw his duffel back into the bathroom and walked out of the door as if it was a completely normal thing for someone to be randomly using the bathroom in a recent bank-turned-crime-scene. He could be subtle - on a good day.

With a better view, he could see Alex’s face better; he had that look on his face he always had when he was in a light worry-anxiety combo spiral. But when he locked his eyes on them, it morphed into one much more surprised and relieved.

“Willie?” He nearly cried, and ran up to hug them. “What are you doing here? How did you get in? Why were you in the bathroom?”

Willie let a little laugh escape his throat and he returned the hug, embracing him tightly. Alex is okay, Alex is okay, Alex is okay, his brain repeated like a broken record. “That’s a lot of questions, hotdog.”

Alex pulled away - he immediately mourned the loss of his body heat pressed against him - and they could see a faint blush dusting his cheeks.

“That’s not— I was worried, okay?”

They gave his shoulder a little shove. “You were worried? I’m not the one who got taken hostage.” He hoped the light tone in his voice covered up the immense worry and anxiety and fear that had been crushing him since Alex first called him.

“Well, I’m not the one with a history of doing dumb thing things with a low impulse control,” Alex shot back.

Well, I hate to break it to you, but that’s exactly what happened, he thought. Doing dumb things? Check. Low impulse control? Always.

“Yeah, well, I’m not dumb enough to try to take on three bank robbers by myself,” He gave him a little laugh, like Yeah, of course I would never do that, Alex. God, he hoped he wasn’t as unconvincing as he sounded.

Alex gave him a weird, hey-wait-a-second look. “Wait, how’d you know there were three?”

Fuck.

His breath caught in his throat, and he felt his all-too-fake smile plastered on his face.

Think fast think fast thinkfastthinkfastthinkfast—

“Uhh,” They started, and they could feel Alex’s glare on him. “The, uh, the cops told me when I got here. I asked what happened and they told me, and then they let me use the bathroom in here as long as I didn’t ‘mess with the crime scene’.” They cringed internally with how bad the lie was.

But Alex seemed to buy it.

Something in Alex’s hand glinted under the harsh fluorescents of the bank and caught their eye. It was his vigilante sticker he’d pressed into his hand before the cops came.

A little balloon of something bubbled in his chest. He kept the sticker. They didn’t really know what they expected him to do with it, but it still shocked them anyways (and if it made him irrationally happy, then that was no one’s business but his own).

“Hey, what’s that?” He innocently (and impulsively) asked Alex, gesturing lightly to the sticker.

“Oh, uh,” Alex spluttered, looking completely caught out. “It’s nothing, really.”

Willie bit down on his growing smile. “You lying to me, hotdog?” He put a dramatic hand to his chest. “You wound me.”

His stuttering trailed off, and Alex looked at him helplessly. “No?”

They couldn’t help it; they giggled. Alex just had that effect on them. “Oh, come on, spill,” They whined and lightly pushed his shoulder again.

Okay, they were willing to admit that the teasing might have been unnecessary, given that they knew everything that happened down to the last detail, but it was hey, it was fun, too.

Alex gave a big, dramatic sigh and a roll of his eyes. “The vigilante who saved us, the Highland Park Vigilante, they usually mark all the places they save people with a sticker. But, uh, since it was a bank and the cops were on their way and everything, they just gave me the sticker instead.”

“Oh my God, you’re blushing.” He definitely was; a light blush dusting his cheeks proved it.

“I am not.” The higher pitch in his voice and the darker pink tint of his blush betrayed him.

“Oh, you so are.”

“Okay, fine, I might be blushing,” Alex admitted, and their grin grew larger. “It was just really cool. I’m in the bank and I’m just thinking ‘oh shit, I’m literally being held hostage,’ and suddenly this guy appears behind the counter, all dressed in black, and literally vaults over the teller window like it was nothing and tackles the robber guarding us. And then, and then the guy tries to shoot at them and they just dodged a bullet like it was nothing. And when you could finally hear the police sirens coming, they ran out of there immediately, but stopped just so they could give me their sticker? And then they winked at me, Willie, they literally winked at me as they gave me the sticker. How am I supposed to not be blushing?”

They could be an oblivious gay sometimes, sure, but he was sure of one thing: Alex was definitely crushing on the Highland Park Vigilante.

He just so happened to be said vigilante and be hopelessly in love with have a big crush on Alex, too.

A small silence following Alex’s rant and his little epiphany hung in the air, as if neither of them knew what to say. Finally, Alex broke their little frozen bubble of silence and pulled his phone out of his pocket, gasping as he scrolled through his notifications.

“Everything all right?” They asked.

“I’m late for band practice,” Alex groaned, “and Luke has been blowing up our band group chat for ages.” He gave him an apologetic look. “Thank you for coming to— Actually, I still have no clue why you came all the way here, but thank you, Willie. Really. I don’t know what you thought you were going to do, but it means a lot to me.”

Now he was the one blushing, his cheeks felt hot, and he couldn’t look away from Alex’s earnest eyes. “It was— It was nothing really.” He rubbed the back of his neck. “I told you, I’d do anything for you, Alex.”

Alex’s mouth had been open as if he was going to say something, but no words came out except for the audible clack of his teeth as he shut his mouth. “I—” He paused for a second. “I, uh, I know.”

Neither of them said anything, and once again, a little silence fell over them.

Willie shoved one of his hands in his jeans pocket and ran the other through his hair. What am I supposed to say to that? He thought, overrun with a gay panic.

But Alex spoke again before he could think of a decent response.

“Bye, Willie.” His voice was quiet and apologetic and hesitant, like he didn’t want to leave them there. “Thanks again.”

There were so many emotions swirling around in the mush of their brain as Alex walked away that they didn’t even know where to start to untangle them all.

But as Alex’s blond hair and pink shirt disappeared around the corner, one emotion pushed its way to the surface.

Joy.

This incredible, lighthearted joy that they could only assume came from the relief from saving Alex, from hugging him and knowing that Alex was safe, from the possibility that maybe he liked them, too.

Willie rode the happiness high as they walked all the way down the hallway towards the back alley where they parked their bike, and they couldn’t even fathom anything that could ruin this amazing feeling.

They were opening the back door of the bank when their traitorous brain decided to crush their happiness with the one thing.

Alex is crushing on Highland Park Vigilante, not Willie.

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