Wait

Wait
I lost my faith when I was young
I clenched my fist to bite my tongue
I leave a wake from all the things that I had done
Cause there wouldn’t be a thing when I moved on

Then I said wait
Are our bodies really piles of dirt?
And is the soul just a metaphor?
I keep my eyes from looking too far up
I fear that there is a heaven above

I stood in lines to bow my head
I’d fold my hands and speak in tongues
To whisper worries to the dead
But I could tell no apparition heard a single word I said
But I’d still call my fear in to the air

Then I said wait
Is my body really part of the earth
And is there blood running through my veins?
I’ll know when I turn to dust
But I fear the answer isn’t enough
So, will I never know heaven or hell?
Or is eternity something worse?
I keep my eyes from looking too far up
I fear that there is a heaven above
(heaven above, heaven above)

I want to give it up
I want to give it up
I want to give it up
But I just need it too much

Wait
Is my body really part of the earth?
And is there blood running through my veins?
I’ll know when I turn to dust
But I fear the answer isn’t enough
So, will I never know heaven or hell?
Or is eternity something worse?
I keep my eyes from looking too far up

A fear that there is a heaven above
A fear that there is a heaven above
A fear that there is a heaven above
I hope there’s not a heaven above

🌲🌲🌲

What happens?
As Hunter becomes more involved with the Church after committing to his Son persona, he comes to reflect on his actions through a more religious lens. He realises his treatment of Ms Leading in his youth was substantially worse than how she treated him, redeeming her in his view. Hunter and Ms Leading get back together, Ms Leading being Hunter’s secret lover while he remains with his Wife.

What’s in a name?
‘Wait’ — reflective of Hunter (and Ms Leading)’s realisations that their judgements of each other in their youth were too harsh and hasty, and the painful awkwardness between them doesn’t need to be there. Also works as Hunter going ‘hold up, I might have messed up,’ after his ego-high trip from King of Swords to The Line.

Whose viewpoint?
Hunter and Ms Leading. But mostly Hunter.

🌲🌲🌲

>0:00 – 0:06 Instrumental
Okay so this is one of those songs where nobody would have figured out its story relevance (Hunter and Ms Leading getting back together) if it weren’t for tips from Casey. I mean, it’s such a dark and moody song, and it’s covered in all this overt religious stuff — how does this have anything to do with Ms Leading or the happiness you think Hunter would feel about getting back with her? Here’s my read.

So for one, there’s been a timeskip. Several months at the very least have passed since The Line, so Hunter has settled into his seat as Mayor and is starting to enact his plans to clean up the City. More relevant for Wait though is the resolution he’s made to live as the Son. What’s something we know about the Son? Well, that he’s a churchgoer, and we can figure from King of Swords that Hunter has publicly affiliated himself with the Church, too. So we can figure that Hunter has been attending Church regularly in service to his persona as the Son.

This is why Hunter is starting to reconsider his faith and view his past actions though a more religiously-flavoured lens. Though I never get the sense of Hunter being a devout Christian, at least not in the sense of one that trusts the word of priests or bishops, the ideas of the faith are starting to play in his mind by osmosis. You can especially see how Hunter’s thoughts shift in this direction in Act V, where he’s frequently in the Church, with a lot of focus on devils and redemption and absolution and whether Hunter’s going to heaven. So that’s part of why it’s such a moody song: Hunter still doesn’t really like the Church or practising religion, but he’s rather deep in the environment of it and it’s forcing him to reconsider his worldview.

Next is the aspect of the ‘reconsidering’ he’s doing being him realising he’s been a jerk who really could stand to forgive Ms Leading. As we forgive those who sin against us, and all. This is again problematic to the Son persona because he’s not supposed to care about Ms Leading anymore, but he does, and winds up letting go of his discontents with her. The natural consequence of this forgiveness, though, is that he wants to (and does) get involved with her again. So now he’s not just betraying the Son persona and opening himself to undermine everything, he’s committing adultery. Great.

But I think you can go even further. A lot of this song focuses on how Hunter (and Ms Leading) are not able to ‘feel’ a divine presence by going to church, but something makes them pause and consider that a divine presence could, or does, exist. (contrast ‘…no apparition heard…’ to ‘Dear Apparition,’) That is, they are able to feel it. How? I would wager, through their relationship. So the sequence of this song would be, Hunter is moved by consideration to Christian teachings to forgive Ms Leading; now that he forgives her, he is not so scared of her and wishes to be near her; Hunter bends to his desires and spends a night with her; from that experience, he feels the divine ‘essence’; and has a massive ‘uuuuuueughh OH NO’ moment (which is this song) where he realises he may have massively, massively erred in his basic worldview. That is, he should be and should have been paying more attention to the concepts described in faith, but decoupled them from church doctrines because these were corrupted/inaccurate; made a distinction between ‘religion’ and ‘faith’ and followed faith. But without knowing what ‘faith’ is (that is not ‘religion’) he’s left clueless of the implications of it except for the implication of, if it’s real, he messed up.

I’ll need to come back to this one and give it another try after thinking on it some more; probably my least confident read here, might be more like v this v but I’ll leave up what I had
V1 -> Hunter (lost faith not just being act3 jaded; m terri death/confusion with ‘religious’ concepts)
C1 -> Hunter
V2 -> M Leading (she prayed to the man with the twin in the mask; not a timeskip – pointing to C & D)
C2 -> M Leading/both?
‘I want to give it up’ -> reconciliation; night together
C3 -> H questions if he is Inherently This; spiritual implications follow
He hopes there’s not a heaven above

might just be super overthinking lol

>I lost my faith when I was young / I clenched my fist to bite my tongue
How young is young here, Hunter? We know he struggled with and seemed to lose all faith in God in Mustard Gas — but that implies he had a faith to lose before that point. How much time has really passed since then? Three, four, five years? I actually take this as an indicator of the opposite (one of those ‘I will only take from you’ lines) — he’s thinking about how faithless he is because he’s been attending church more now and it’s been making him (like it or not) veer more Christian.

‘Clenched my fist to bite my tongue’ -> Hunter’s discontent with the church, as shown in Bitter Suite IV. He wants to speak up and say something to dispel the notions of figures like the Priest that give them such control over the Congregation, especially because Hunter himself doesn’t see their word as legitimate, but just simmers quietly. Probably the behaviour of figures like the Priest contributes massively to his lack of faith, as well.

>I leave a wake from all the things that I had done / Cause there wouldn’t be a thing when I moved on
Hunter has never before considered that his sinful or impulsive actions could have lasting consequences. This applies both to how it effects other people (like Ms Leading) and as an implication on his own fate — obviously, he knows he has messed things up before and that his personality has repeatedly gotten him into trouble, but only now is the idea really settling into his head that he can’t just erase his sins into a blank slate and disassociate from them with no foul.

Like, if hypothetically there were a God, and Hunter’s soul was destined to be judged, the judgement likely wouldn’t be positive. He’s done a lot of bad things that he’s never cleaned up because he never had to be the one to deal with the consequences, and upon reflection he doesn’t feel great about that.

I’ll also note that this song has really heavy normal-Hunter intonations. Maybe I just equate normal-Hunter as edgy-Hunter but he sounds pretty genuine/not trying to be all Son-Persona pious here.

‘”Keep this secret safe, or watch your flock devoured by the flame / Left in my wake; I’ll burn through you.”’ Very different context but the atmosphere idea is the same; the wake Hunter leaves behind has been destructive.

>Then I said wait / Are our bodies really piles of dirt? / And is the soul just a metaphor?
So on the face of it this is us hearing Hunter’s view towards religion shift; he might not adhere 1:1 to Christian doctrine, but he is starting to consider whether there are higher forces in the universe that do have implications for him on a spiritual or non-temporal level. Is there an afterlife he should be concerned about? Is there some figure keeping a tally on this stuff? But at the same time he’s considering what his true nature (his ‘soul’, which he can’t escape from) really is.

Since this song is a duet between Hunter and Ms Leading, she’s probably also having these thoughts and the same realisations that Hunter is.

>I keep my eyes from looking too far up / I fear that there is a heaven above
Hunter is conscious that his actions have been bad and if there were justice, he would be punished. Rather, maybe he already is being punished, in the sense of being locked out of heaven.

Amazing line too. I mean, of course you’d fear, if you’d committed yourself to the scummy tactics and cynical worldview that Hunter has only to stumble into the thought of, wait, maybe the world isn’t as bad as I think it is, it just looks that way because I’ve bumbled myself into the worst part of it by being an awful person/unrepentant sinner.

>I stood in lines to bow my head / I’d fold my hands and speak in tongues / To whisper worries to the dead
Suggesting Hunter’s uneasy but dedicated attendance in Church over a timeskip period. He’s been going along with the rituals and ceremonies, taking communion, sharing in hymns and prayers, and so on without really believing in anything.

‘Fold my hands’ -> Evokes the image of praying, while also describing how Hunter is restraining his behaviour. IE, he doesn’t believe, but he went along with the gesture.

>But I could tell no apparition heard a single word I said
Hunter does not feel a connection to God achieved through these rituals or by his church attendance.

>But I’d still call my fear in to the air
All the same, he can’t help but want to feel that connection to God, and divine reassurance that things will turn out well, to know that someone or something absolute has heard him. Kind of similar sentiments to Ms Leading in The Church and The Dime, though that was a long time ago. (This verse might be Ms Leading?)

>Then I said wait / Is my body really part of the earth / And is there blood running through my veins?
Love these lines. ‘Am I connected to more things than just the ‘me’ I am in a given moment? Is my true nature more physical or spiritual? What is out there? Is God real? What am I intrinsically?’. The genuine sentiment with which Hunter wants to feel God and reassurances/love from God forces him to consider these things. Note, since Hunter doesn’t seem to have a 1:1 attachment to Christian doctrine, the conception of the ‘God’ he is reaching out for may be a slightly different figure than the conventional ideas of Christian God.

>I’ll know when I turn to dust / But I fear the answer isn’t enough
He’ll figure out the nature of God, if God is even real or not, and if spiritual factors in life are a genuine thing once he’s dead, but just rationally ‘knowing’ that God does or doesn’t exist isn’t enough to stop Hunter from wondering. Rather, even if he does come to understand the nature of God, it probably won’t satisfy Hunter. ‘Beg for a reason he could allow this’, and all — whatever method underlays this all is totally inscrutable to him.

I think this line is hinting at Hunter feeling that there is something, though he can’t say that it’s God as he understands it necessarily.

>So, will I never know heaven or hell? / Or is eternity something worse?
Another one of those opposite-lines; Hunter considering the possibilities of where his soul could wind up postmortem if God is real (considering he’s not and hasn’t been a good believer — no connection to God to let him know heaven or hell, on top of the general inscrutability of the method), or the void of nothingness (among other possible horrifying alternatives) if it turns out there is no higher power. Also a general statement on Hunter’s situation — is he in exaltation as Hunter or as the Son, or is there no such thing and he’ll just be spinning his wheels forever?

It is kind of hard to pin Hunter morally right now — he’s done some terrible things and been aggressive, manipulative, selfish, immoral at times, but it’s also difficult to call him a bad person or evil in the way that, say, TP&P is.

>I keep my eyes from looking too far up / I fear that there is a heaven above
Recognising that he mistreated Ms Leading far worse than she mistreated him, and would not want to be judged for his continued behaviour towards her, Hunter forgives Ms Leading. Ms Leading simultaneously has the same realisation and forgives Hunter, so the two are finally able to regard each other on equal footing again. Naturally, with their misgivings towards each other gone, they want to associate again.

>I want to give it up / But I just need it too much
I would wager the ‘it’ he wants to give up but needs too much is love. So that makes this the pointer to him getting together with Ms Leading again — no matter how many times he tries, whether it’s in Waves, A Night On The Town, The Line, or wherever, he just is not able to dissociate from his feelings of love towards Ms Leading. It’s not even that he wants to engage in this love (it stands to destroy the life he’s built as the Son, and Hunter is perennially terrified of being controlled, mistreated, or doing dumb impulsive life-uprooting acts due to his neediness around love), but love is so foundational to him that it’s like his water (’Well has gone dry and I with it’ and all). He is not able to tear himself away from it.

What this tells us by extension is that he doesn’t love the Fiance, or rather his Wife. If he were able to satiate his need to feel and reciprocate love with her, he wouldn’t be falling into this relationship with Ms Leading again.

Love the desperation in this.

>Chorus Repetition
Mannnn — I feel there’s a lot going on here, but the lyrics are dealing with such complex ideas that I can’t really line them out smoothly. One of those ones where you just kinda have to let the vibe take you, with the story context of him getting back with Ms Leading despite his every effort to grow out of/psych himself out of it being the root. Like, is this just him? Is this just inherently him?

>A fear that there is a heaven above / I hope there’s not a heaven above
Amazing song. I get the image of Hunter returning to his home with the Wife after a visit to Ms Leading, then to the Church, and knowing that he’s done wrong. Like, if being true to Hunter was the move to take all along, or was the move he’s just always predestined to take because he’s too weak(?) to separate himself from his feelings and desire for love, he’s done wrong by building and committing himself to the Son persona, especially to the extent he has. If the Son persona is the right course to take though, then he’s doing the wrong damn thing again by folding to his heart (which has so far only gotten him into TROUBLE) and indulging in his desire to be with Ms Leading. Whatever is right, his irresolution and two-timing has made him definitely wrong.

Plus whichever way you slice it, he’s also just plain committing adultery. If that catches up to him, he knows he’s screwed — hence hoping there’s no heaven, or force that could judge him.

Hunter enters the Church.

The Line | Act IV | Ouroboros