"That doesn't mean you're incapable of feeling things or caring about people," Hartley said, feeling frustrated with how stupid Eobard was being. "Business. Law. The Economy of politics. You sounds like you're talking about my parents. I was raised the same way you were. And it screwed me up for a long time. But at the end of the day, I wasn't going to let them control what I feel. And you know what? Me caring about people, and being open about how I feel, and all the things that made them turn their backs on me didn't make me any less of a goddamn genius. I made some pretty bad choices along the way, sure, because whatever you might think, people screw up a lot. But I'm in a mostly good place now...panic attacks aside. Whatever you think, it's not that you're incapable of caring about people. It's that you're too fucking scared to take a chance. And if you could get over that, you'd be a lot better off."
He frowned as Eobard talked about how much he'd regretted killing him. How much he wanted to fix it. "It matters," he said. "You let me think that you didn't care. That I was just...collateral damage to your issues and that it didn't mean anything. You could have just said. Jesus, Eobard. It was a fucking accident. You didn't have to pretend it wasn't to protect your ego. You didn't have to throw me away. What if...what if that had stopped me from coming back?" He didn't know how this place worked. Maybe if you got eaten by a dinosaur, you didn't come back. "I mean...you've got to stop trying to live up to this idea you have of what you have to be...what? Because you traveled back in time and something told you that you were destined to be the Flash's enemy. Newsflash, genius. You could have just as easily not done that. That's the whole point of time travel. It can change things. Hell, I was a bad guy before Barry's trip back changed that. You could have done the same thing."
He really wondered how Eobard's brain even worked. He was so smart, but so willfully stupid at the same time. "You can change," he said. "But you have to make an effort. Not just hide away and refuse to even try. It takes time and it's not easy, but you don't have to just resign yourself to being the villain forever."