A/N: Okay, I know Harley being one of his students and having a crush on him has been done a thousand times but I couldn't resist and I'm not sorry.
"D'ya remember me?" asked Harley Quinn one day.
"Excuse me?" Jonathan Crane blinked. He was confused, both by her sudden decision to talk to him and her strange question.
"Do you remember me?" she repeated, speaking a bit more slowly.
"I'm not sure what you're referring to," he said. Why would she expect him to remember her? Remember her from what?
"From GCU," she said, laughing as if it should have been obvious. Or maybe she was just laughing for the sake of laughing. He recalled at least that that was something she tended to do.
"What about it?" he asked. Nothing she said made any sense to him. Had she been at the university during one of his revenge schemes? Why on earth would she expect him to remember one particular face from that?
"You don't!" she said, trying to sound offended, but not quite managing to wipe the smile off her face.
"No, I don't," he agreed, wondering if that was the conversation's end and if he could walk away now.
But Harley didn't think that that was the end of the conversation, and she said, "I was in your 317! I sat in the middle of the second row!"
What? She had been in one of his classes? But that was years ago and she had always seemed so young! How could this young woman have ever been one of his students? He was at a loss for words.
She took his silence to mean that she needed to elaborate more. "I asked for a letter of recommendation for grad school? And you turned me down because you had too much work to do?"
This bit of information did nothing to help jog his memory. He almost always turned down requests for letters of recommendation back then. He had many experiments going on on the side; he barely even had time to make his lesson plans before each semester began.
"I'm sorry," he said at last. "I really can't say that I remember you. I had a lot of students back then."
"You didn't even recognize me back when I worked at Arkham?" she asked with a bit of a pout.
"As what?" He was at first confused that she once had a job there, but then he seemed to remember someone once mentioning that that was how she had met the Joker. Still, he could not imagine what sort of job she could have had.
"As a doctor, duh!" She burst out laughing. "Jeez, your head really is in the clouds, huh? Dr. Quinzel! We never had any sessions, but I saw you a few times, around."
She was a doctor. This young woman, this girl he had always thought of as a child, was once a doctor. Not only was she a former student of his, she was old enough to be a doctor, and at Arkham, no less. He shook his head in disbelief and chuckled.
"What is it?" she said, her eyes brightening. "Didja remember?"
"No, child, I didn't," said Crane, now unable to wipe the smile off his own face. This was just too much for him. "I'm sorry, but there are just some things I didn't pay enough attention to."
"Oh well," she said with a shrug and a sigh. "Just thought I'd see if ya did or didn't. No harm in tryin', ya know?"
He nodded politely, still blown away by the knowledge that she was the young girl he had thought she was, but was, in fact, an accomplished adult. He doubted that there was anything she could have said at that moment that would have shocked him more.
"But if ya don't remember me, I guess that means you also didn't notice the huge crush I had on ya back then, huh?"
Well. Except for that.