"Before the story begins, is it such a sin...
For me to take what's mine until the end of time?"
This struck me (long after I started daydreaming, probably 100+ listens in, very perceptive of me) because Paradise's quote/tagline on toyhou.se is, as of this writing, "I'll get what's mine."
"We were more than friends, before the story ends;
And I will take what's mine, create what God would never design..."
text
"I gotta make up for what I've done
'Cause I was all up in a piece of Heaven
While you burned in Hell, no peace forever..."
To me, this experience of "burning in Hell" has less to do with an end result of Milkweed's death than it does with his life; being a high-level U.S. military mind-control slave, there would have been a well-hidden core of suffering and despair beneath his veneer of competence/sophistication and innocence. I also think this sense of needing to right wrongs on Paradise's end makes sense; he's dead now, and being dead means transitioning into something immaterial, which--for someone who thrived on material things and was willing to kill in cold blood to preserve his position in relation to securing further material things--means he's lost everything. The only thing he has now is Milkweed. A "lesser being" he kept enslaved is now his only source of familiarity and/or comfort. In death, he is forced to confront the reality that he cannot bring his wealth or his comforts with him as he passes on, and that his only true possessions are his actions. There is nothing left for him to hold.
like the twin serpents of the caduceus
(Interestingly, the flag of the U.S. Surgeon General is symbolized by an anchor--Naval symbol--and a caduceus
"The first documented instance of a caduceus being misused as a medical symbol occurred in the 1850s, when it was applied to the chevrons of U.S. Army hospital stewards. By 1902, it had been added to the uniforms of U.S. Army medical officers. After WWI, the Navy also began to use the symbol in its Hospital Corps." (Anna Claire Mauney, "The Caduceus Isn't The Medical Symbol You Think It Is")