Harley didn't leave her dorm all weekend. She spent all day Saturday lying in bed, staring at the ceiling and clutching one of her pillows to her chest. Her roommate assumed she was hungover, and that wasn't an unfair comparison, though it was not entirely accurate. There was no pounding headache or sensitivity to sound, but every light that met her eyes was too bright to look at without squinting and she felt a little disconnected from reality. She even felt disconnected from her own body. She had to keep squeezing the pillow to make sure it was still there.
Strangely, her memory of what she'd gone through during the experiment was rapidly fading. It had been so intense when it was happening that it was disconcerting that the whole thing was just…slipping from her mind. What she remembered most came directly before Crane rubbed the drug into her skin and after she came down from its effects.
Most vivid of all were the memories of lying on the floor wrapped around her professor and the smell of his aftershave. Why those stuck with her above anything else, she didn't quite know, but she clung to them desperately even as everything else fell away.
On Sunday, Harley actually left her bed for more than five minutes and ventured as far as the dormitory candy machine to get a chocolate bar. She ate one square of it but felt too sick to finish the rest. She handed it off to another student, a girl obviously in the middle of a cram session who probably needed the boost in serotonin, and went back to her room.
As the day wore on, her memories of Friday night faded more, until all that remained was the ghost of Crane's hand on her chin when he forced her to look at him after the experiment was through.
Distressingly, her body seemed to remember better than her mind did. She felt generally tense for no discernible reason and had no appetite. It was almost like recovering from a very bad flu—she felt achy and weak, nauseous and dizzy—but her brain couldn't recall why she felt this way, stubbornly refusing to fill in the holes in her memory that admittedly were probably better off missing.
Harley skipped classes on Monday, deciding to spend the day wandering downtown Gotham, passing the time with window shopping. By the time night fell and she returned to campus, almost every trace of her long night in Crane's office was gone except a few bits and pieces. Whether the gaps in her memory were a side effect of the drug he'd exposed her to or her mind trying to protect itself from further trauma, she didn't know, but by Tuesday morning she was feeling almost as good as new.
As the week progressed, Harley found the minor lingering physical effects of the drug gradually disappearing one by one. She didn't even realize her breathing had been shallow for days until she managed to take a truly deep breath on Thursday night; she didn't notice that her vision had been slightly blurry until it returned full force and she found herself no longer needing to squint at her textbooks.
When Friday finally arrived, she made her way to Crane's office once more. She felt nervous, but a different sort of nervous than she had the week before. Her heart fluttered in her chest when she knocked on the door and her breath caught when he opened it.
His jacket was gone again, as was his tie. He was already wearing latex gloves.
"Come in."
She stepped into the office and immediately took her place on the loveseat. He locked the door behind her.
"Tonight we'll be trying an injection." He seemed to produce a syringe filled with yellow-green liquid from out of nowhere. "Given that the drug will be delivered directly into your bloodstream, this will almost certainly be more…severe than last week."
Suddenly there was a lump in her throat and she didn't know why. She forced it down.
He recognized her apprehension. "If you do not wish to continue…"
"No, I want to." She gave him a smile. "I'm no quitter."
He sat beside her and took her arm. Harley sucked air in through her teeth when the needle pierced her skin and felt faint as she watched the plunger force the drug into her vein.
The site of the injection immediately grew cold. Within ten seconds, she felt as though she had rivulets of cold water running down her entire body. Harley began to shake.
Though the memory of her last exposure to the drug was almost completely gone, what little was left came roaring back with a vengeance in startling flashes of sensation the moment the drug entered her bloodstream.
She instinctively braced herself for the onset of blistering heat that she knew would follow the ice in her veins, but it never came. Instead, she grew colder. Her teeth chattered.
"C-c-cold," she stuttered, collapsing back into the softness of the loveseat. She threw her head back and stared at the ceiling with eyes that barely saw anything in front of them. Her breaths became short and shallow.
This continued for several minutes, but unlike the week before, the uncomfortable sensations were kept at a low, constant hum instead of mounting to a climax of hysterical terror. Her nerves were raw but she didn't feel like screaming or crying, which was a vast improvement.
The only thing that grew worse was the scope of her vision. Blackness closed in around the edges until she could see nothing more than two pinpoints, like twin lights at the end of a tunnel in the distance. "D-d-dark."
A minute passed. Five. Ten. She felt like she was lying in a snowbank in the dark, but nothing more than that. She was still aware of her body enough that she could feel Crane's fingers pressed to the inside of her wrist to keep track of her thudding pulse.
"That's enough."
Harley jerked when she felt the metal tip of a syringe against her skin. Something heavy came down on her chest, pinning her in place to keep her still as the needle pricked her skin, and the relief was slow to come. As the effects began to subside, she was reminded of coming inside to thaw out after playing for a very long time in the snow. She tingled everywhere, like fingers that were near frostbitten being held under warm water, and took slow, wavering breaths as she came down.
Her eyes watered as her vision returned, leaving her slowly blinking away tears and staring at the ceiling.
"How do you feel?"
Taking a few breaths, she gathered strength enough to speak. "Like…I'll never be warm again."
"You are quite clammy." She felt his hand on her forehead, then at her throat. Then she felt something being draped over her, warm and scratchy and smelling of something familiar.
Though she felt fully awake, it wasn't until later when she realized that she'd been hovering near the precipice of unconsciousness for hours. When she actually came to, sunlight was filtering through the blinds over the office window and she was covered with Crane's tweed jacket.
He was still sitting next to her, watching her intently though there were dark circles under his eyes. "It's nearly six."
Harley rubbed her head, which was pounding. "It is?"
"Do you remember anything?"
"I remember…" She strained but the thump-thump-thump inside her skull stopped her from getting anywhere. "No."
"Damn."
"Did…oh." Harley shut her eyes to try and control a sudden wave of nausea. "Did you keep watch over me all night?"
"Not in the least. I timed my return to precisely coincide with your regaining consciousness."
A weak smile that took almost all her energy played on her lips. "You did keep watch."
"I couldn't very well leave you alone all night in my office," he said shortly. "There's no telling what manner of trouble you might have gotten yourself into while I wasn't looking."
"Don't worry, Professor Crane," Harley said, opening her eyes again, "I'd never sneak a peek at your diary."