Clever.
“I’m pretty sure if you killed Barry instead of his mother, you’d still be stuck here. You wouldn’t exist as the Reverse Flash because the Flash wouldn’t exist,” he muttered, raising an eyebrow. He really should have thought about that plan, but Hart wasn’t going to say that part aloud.
Hart huffed as a piece of his chicken was stolen from him and Eobard plopped himself down beside him. He scootched himself a bit to the side so he wasnt as close to the elder speedster. “You could have kept me. Just ignored my pleas to stop the Accelerator. If you had just told me not to go to the press, I probably wouldn’t have.” He listened to his former mentor speak, tilting his head as he did. He was famous in the future? For something other than being a Rathaway? Well that made him feel good. “D-Do I really do great things? Good kind of great or bad? Are you lying to me about that? Or telling the truth?”
“It may not have been personal, but there were several things you could have done that didn’t involve firing me.”
ϟ “At the time, when it seemed like a good idea; I didn’t fully grasp Barry’s involvement in the creation of the Speed Force.” The false doctor smiled and placed the glasses he had smuggled in his pocket onto his face, pressing them to his nose with his middle finger. “Y’see. When I altered the timeline and lost my speed, only then did I realize that Barry not only harnessed the Speed Force; he created it. And that.. That was something that no one had known. In the countless biographies and mounds of data that I had combed through on his life, nothing had been mentioned of his creating the Speed Force. Just that he’d harnessed it. So, in the spirit of radical transparency, I suppose it’s true that you learn something new every day. On that day, I learned that without Barry, there was no Speed Force.” Thawne sighed dramatically, crossing his arms over his chest before looking back over to the boy. “A miscalculation. But only because I didn’t have all of the variables to the equation. So, cut me some slack. It’s not like you entirely projected that your family would kick you to the curve just because you were a little too friendly towards your roommates at boarding school.” Thawne rolled his eyes at the suggestion that Hartley would’ve just let a colossal failure blow up in his face without retaliation. “Come on, Hartley. You’re smarter than that. You’re.. Prideful. This was our project. And while Harrison Wells’ reputation could’ve withstood the failure; you wouldn’t have just suffered silently. Don’t lie to me, I know you way better than that.” He chuckled. “No, you would’ve immediately come out against me; said it wasn’t your fault. That you warned me and I ignored you. And that would’ve brought more attention to the issue than I wanted.” “But rest easy, in my world; you were to become a great composer and conductor of the Central City Orchestra. You work was.. Beautiful. You often joked even about how you were the “first gay supervillain to ‘go straight’.”
