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Old vampires had a tendency to start playing God.
Rosalie had seen it many times by now. First with Carlisle, who believed himself to be some sort of savior. After so many years of immortality he had lost his grip on reality, and he was unable to see that himself. His great mission in life was to serve God, but during the course of that mission he had started to act like God’s substitute instead.
It had taken long before the line had been crossed. For many years, he had used his knowledge to serve humans. But something changed in 1918, when he met Edward in Chicago during the Spanish flu. Rosalie wasn’t exactly sure what, she hadn’t been there after all. She thought that maybe the possibility of creating a companion was a thought that had been creeping up on Carlisle for a long time by then. Maybe it had been Edward’s desperate mother, begging Carlisle to do anything to save her son, thinking she was giving him permission. Maybe it was the loneliness. Or maybe, Rosalie thought, it was all of it.
Something must have changed after Edward. Rosalie was sure of that at least. Once that line had been crossed, and Carlisle had been standing there with realization of the power he possessed, there had been no turning back. When Esme came along, he had saved her too. He had saved her for his sake, because he wanted her. Was that really the definition of saving someone? Was it the definition of selflessness and empathy to curse someone to a life you yourself had tried to free yourself from so desperately?
When Rosalie herself came along Carlisle was already too far in. He was well past the line, so far from it that it had disappeared from his field of vision. At that point, he had probably forgotten there had been a line to cross in the first place. And Carlisle had saved her. For Edward . Rosalie wanted to barf at the thought of her and Edward, together. Carlisle had wanted to bring home a nice gift to his lonely son. Conveniently enough, she had been right there.
Carlisle wasn’t the only one. In Rosalie’s opinion, Alice surely wasn’t any better. Her gift and lack of perspective had turned her into God’s self-appointed side kick. She thought she knew everything. Her subjective, ever changing visions often left her with an incorrect or incomplete answer, but she didn’t take that into account when she had chosen herself to play the gift giver of immortality. Her human past had somehow been erased, leaving her as the only vampire in history to have been born as one.
And Edward, Carlisle’s favorite son. He, whose one and only ambition in this existence was to become like his father. Even during those early years of rebellion, when he had left Carlisle and Esme to hunt for human blood, he had played the role of a savoir. The God of Justice, the savior of women in distress. It was Carlisle he was rebelling against, yet he did his best to do good in his father’s eyes. Rosalie never understood the way Edward looked at their adoptive father. What a dangerous path Edward had taken, following a man who had lost his own compass.
Maybe it was just another side effect of immortality, Rosalie thought. Not only the curse of a forever static life, but also the curse of a failing point of view. Or maybe it was a family disease, passed down from one generation to another. A syndrome, given from Carlisle to the creatures he called his children.
Sometimes, Rosalie wondered if she was yet suffering from that syndrome herself.