More things I didn’t discover until my 10th playthrough:
When Ashley wakes up at the beginning of chapter 14
when Leon is sitting on the floor at her bedside, and he’s winded and his vision is blurring and he’s actively planning his suicide and probably wondering at what point he should actually pull the trigger so that he does it before he turns, and he’s very likely just hoping and praying that Ada will actually come through for him post-mortem and get Ashley home in his stead
yeah so like when she wakes up during that
and Leon’s name is the first thing out of her mouth? She doesn’t just say his name. She also puts a hand on his shoulder
and that’s when he perks up and gets up and his symptoms suddenly all vanish and I want to fuckgin throw up now that I’ve noticed it.
I’ve talked before about how Ashley is Leon’s anchor to reality, but that is actually literally true in this instance. When Leon sat down and flipped his gun around and pulled the slide back, he was checking to make sure that a round was chambered. Then he takes a deep, steadying breath.
This happens just after his suppressant wore off, and there was no way for him to know when Ashley was going to wake up. It could’ve been hours. And by then, it would’ve been too late for him.
He was checking for a round in the chamber so that he could use it on himself if it came down to it.
Canonically, this isn’t the first time he’s considered suicide. In RE6, he admits that he considered it (”a few times, actually”) while still in Raccoon City, and also just after escaping. So, when he’s sitting there at Ashley’s bedside, he isn’t considering suicide with a “I hope it doesn’t come to this” mentality – it’s more of a “It was probably always going to end like this anyway” one.
And I can say that with confidence because it’s the closest he ever gets to actually turning (prior to his hallucinations at the very end of chapter 15) – and it seems to be entirely self-inflicted. On some level, mentally, he’s already given up.
But then it’s her touch and her voice that clears his vision, steadies his breathing, chases away the pain and weakness that caused him to sit in the first place, and even brings a smile to his face. Suddenly, he’s fine. And he doesn’t have another fit like that again, outside of Saddler deliberately causing one.
I think about that in tandem with how bad his mental health gets later in the series – how dark his depression gets in some canon installments, how profoundly his trauma manifests, and how he tries to self-medicate with liquor until it turns into a problem that just gets worse and worse and worse as the years go by.
And I just have to wonder if he’d have ever gotten that bad if he hadn’t walked away from Ashley at some nebulous point after RE4.
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