Hartley checked into a hotel. He had run by his tiny studio apartment and gotten the few belongings he had. Clothes, his research notes on a USB drive and the contents of his external hard drive. And of course, his laptop. He didn't want to risk being found out by Team Flash. And a hotel room gave him just the air of anonymity he required.
He undressed and stepped into the shower. As the hot water poured from the shower head, he leaned forward and rested his forehead and arms against the gray tiles on the wall. He let the water wash over him.
He had failed in his attempt to exact vengeance on Harrison. Harrison. The memory of a time when he had such hopes of one day becoming, well, his, made him fume. How could he have been so stupid. His mentor had played right into his vanity. His pride. He had only ever wanted him to build the particle accelerator. He had known it would explode. Or had planned it to explode. Either way, the minute the accelerator had become ready, he could see it in Harrison's eyes. He hadn't understood it then, but he had seen it. The suddenly cold look, that let him know that their partnership had come to an end. He had wondered if he had done something wrong. Harrison firing him had been just the icing on the cake, the confirmation of everything he had been suspecting for a while.
He turned off the water flow, and covered himself with the soft hotel towel. He wiped the moistness from his forehead, and stepped back to the room. He had been, if not good, then a decent person once. One who didn't kill people. His hatred for Wells had overcome his basic nature. He had hurt a lot of people. Even people he knew. As he had been informed during his short-lived return to his cell, Cisco had received a concussion as payment for running to Hartley's cell as he had been trying to escape. It hadn't been his intention. But as he stepped out of the cell, and saw Cisco past out on the floor amongst the rubble, he had simply smiled. He had heard his erratic heartbeat, but he hadn't cared. He just walked away.
Similarly just half an hour ago, he had hurt Cisco again. Means to an end, of course. He couldn't go back to Star Labs when they still believed Harrison Wells was a good person. He was sure Harrison would stage an unfortunate accident which would lead to his demise in the hands of another one of their detainees.
Still. As his deeply religious republican family had taught him, thou shalt not kill. And injuring people would probably also be implied on that list. He had never been much of a catholic. But it had made his parents happy when he pretended to be one, so he had played along. Until he discovered that there were qualities about him that would never sit well with his parents. That was the thing about him. He had known that it had been a bad idea to come out to his parents. But the man he had been dating at the time convinced him that it would be okay. Fast forward a few years, his parents had disowned him and he could barely remember his ex's name. That was when Harrison Wells had made his way into his life. He had known how to play him from the start. He used his expressions to indicate intimacy and care for him. He never outright said he was interested, but he knew how to give him hope. And Hartley, overjoyed to finally find a mind to match his own, had taken all his words to heart, in the hopes of finally having a new family.
What a sucker he had been.
The next day, he woke up. He took of his night implants and replaced them with his regular ones. Before he had designed the night implants, it had been impossible for him to sleep with people talking and moving in the rooms that neighbored his apartment. He had made special versions of them for day use, which were the ones he had used to break out of Star Labs.
He had dreamt of his parents. In the dream he was coming out to his parents, about being gay as well as being the "Pied Piper". They disapproved of his turn to the dark side, but were still more okay with it than him being gay. His ex had been replaced by some other guy with long dark hair. The dream ended just as the other man had been about to turn around.
He got up and put on a shirt. He went through his closet for a while to find the pants that went with the shirt. He opened his laptop. As he had pondered last night, he needed to become a decent person again. But how? When all he wanted to do was make Harrison pay with every inch of his being. Usually he knew exactly what to do. But this was a case of wanting to change himself for the better, and he needed some advice. Since he had tried to kill or hurt everyone he knew, he had to turn for outside help, aka the Internet. He knew it was beneath him, but what choice did he have? Go to church and ask a priest to help him get over his obsession with Harrison? No.
He searched for an ask page and typed in his problem, changing of course the actual events and the details of the situation. Basically he was asking the Internet how to stop wanting to hurt his evil ex and others because of him. He clicked "ok" and posted the question.
As he waited for replies, he decided to go have breakfast in the hotel's dining area. To avoid being seen, he gathered the foods he wanted to a plate and took it up to his room. He could have ordered room service, of course, but he liked the short walk he did on his way up and down the stairs.
As he made his way back to his room, he set the plate on the table and refreshed the page that he had left open on his laptop. 15 replies. He scrolled down the page.
"Girl, nobody's worth going to jail for. Get over him sweetie. He didn't deserve you anyway."
"I n0 many girls like you, and w/ time, I'm sure u'll have the strength to get over 'im, but inda mean time u need like tehrapy!"
"Get over it. Period."
"You need to get a life. Seriously. Your ex sucks, but if you hurt other people to get back at him, it's you who sucks."
"This is why we need feminism, a woman feels so worthless after losing a guy that her life is over."
"We don't need feminism, we need less women like this complaining about how a man is to blame for all her problems."
He read the last comments but they were no longer about advice to him and more about feminism and its need or needlessness. He was irked by the second commenter thinking that therapy was spelled t-e-h-r-a-p-y. Not that that was the only thing wrong about that comment. Apparently all the commenters had thought he had been a teenage girl. Which was fine. Whatever to not alert the Star Labs team to his trail. Not that they were probably looking at ask pages destined for young female audiences, apparently. The condescending tone of the comments infuriated him, but reading them again and again, he had to admit that most of them hit home. In the grand scheme of things, Wells was evil, no doubt, but he was clearly too powerful for Hartley to beat. At least for now. But personally? If anybody had looked at his life, they probably would've said "get over it" too. He had always been the one seeing the small things that made people tick. For the situation be the reverse, as it was now? Unacceptable.
He needed to focus on building his own life back up again. He chuckled, as he knew he was sounding like a life time movie or something as cheesy. Probably something Cisquito liked. He smiled. Finally he knew exactly what to do. It felt good to know that.