Harley's weekend recovery went much faster and a good bit easier this time than it had the last. Part of that undoubtedly had to do with the fact that she had no memories to speak of at all—and thus didn't have to worry about them disappearing—and part of it had to do with the fact that the aftereffects were no worse than a very mild hangover. She spent Saturday in bed, drinking lots of water and taking ibuprofen and by Sunday her appetite returned full force, meaning she spent the day eating cheez-doodles and milkshakes.

When she arrived for psych class on Monday, she realized that something had changed in the dynamic she shared with her professor. While just two weeks earlier she'd been trying on his last name the way other women tried on shoes, she didn't spend class doodling in the margins of her notebook like a high school girl, neither was she caught up in imagining him without his tweed coat or fantasizing about making him notice her.

Instead, she stared at him intently, studying him. When he turned to the blackboard to scrawl on it, she noticed for the very first time the way his long, tapered fingers held tight to the chalk. She watched his movements, taking note of how fluid they were, how practiced. She listened to him lecture—really listened—and heard how he spoke to his students. Everyone thought him to be irrationally short tempered, but he wasn't. Everyone thought him a pompous windbag, but he wasn't that, either.

He wasn't lecturing just to hear himself speak. He wasn't sarcastic and abusive because he enjoyed it. Everything he did had one end goal: to give his students the critical thinking skills to solve problems themselves. To make them better students. They just resisted him every step of the way so much that he had no choice but to resort to involving them by making them upset. He could have easily droned on for an hour and put half the class to sleep, but through insults to their intelligence and harried fist shaking, he kept their attention enough to force them to listen.

Crane, she realized, was a very passionate man. So passionate that he wanted nothing more than to infect others with his own thirst for knowledge. He cared. He cared so much that he was probably ranting and raving himself into an early grave for the sake of teaching a few dozen students how to think for themselves.

He was, despite everyone else's assertions to the contrary, an excellent, brilliant teacher.

The shallow crush that Harley had developed over the past month began to deepen into true admiration. Had anyone else known about their extracurricular activities, they would have recognized this as being rather warped, but for good or ill, the woman in question didn't have that much in the way of self awareness.

Friday night, she went to his office again. She tried not to look too happy to see him, but he gave her a suspicious enough look that she figured she must have failed.

"Which one tonight, teach?"

"The powder."

Hours later, she sat curled up on the loveseat, shakily drinking a cup of tea that Crane had provided her with. The bottom of the cup clattered noisily against the saucer in her hand as he wrote down everything she was still experiencing. The emotional response to the powdered version of the drug had been minimal in comparison to the first night, but the physical symptoms were quite pronounced. A constant tremor was one of the more troublesome things that plagued her. That and the fact that her heart beat so fast it she wondered if it might have been replaced by a hummingbird.

Harley's recovery was very, very slow. Her memories didn't fade. She couldn't eat for two days afterward. Nightmares tore her out of sleep three times a night over the weekend. The only thing that comforted her at all was the memory of Crane's arms holding her immobile as she shook on the loveseat during the experiment, keeping her from shuddering right off of it and into the floor.

This time, when she skipped classes on Monday, it was because she had no choice. She skipped the whole week, in fact, forging a doctor's note that said she was having a very bad bout with the flu. Though she knew she desperately needed the rest, she hated missing class.

(Well, she hated missing his class…)

She still made it to Crane's office on Friday, as scheduled, but she looked so pale and drawn that he turned her away, telling her to take another week to rest up. Harley, deprived of her weekly ritual of spending time with him, found herself spiraling into depression after he sent her home. This compounded the misery of her week without seeing him.

It wasn't until Saturday morning when she started to feel anywhere close to human again and she began attending classes once more the following Monday.

The week seemed to crawl by, perhaps because she so looked forward to being in his company privately again. It didn't even matter to her that she would almost certainly go through emotional and physical hell the next time she saw him as their experiments continued, so long as she saw him. She even tried to find excuses to stay after class, just to be near him, but she never managed to pull it off.

She realized soberly on Friday morning that, once the night was through, every day at Gotham University would be like the last two weeks had been. Unless plans changed at the very last moment for some unforeseeable reason, this would be their final private session together. Crane would probably go right back to ignoring her the way he did during the long month after they'd first created the formula and she would go right back to trying to get his attention any way she could. At least, until summer break, when they'd be separated for three months without so much as a chance to see each other in passing.

Harley couldn't let that happen. She had to do something to let him know how she felt about him…she had to make him understand how much their time together meant to her.

But…how? Every subtle hint she'd thrown his way had gone right over his head. Even the not-so-subtle hints had done that. The only thing she hadn't yet tried was physically throwing herself at him…