I love your character rewrites! Can you do Ashlynn Ella and her stepsisters?
I made this post a while back that details Ashlynn’s relationship to destiny and others like Apple and Duchess which might interest you, but alongside that here’s a bit more about how Ashlynn, Prudence, and Charlotte work in this au!
For Prudence and Charlotte, the first change I would make is having them be present in the story from the very start as minor antagonists. In the second series of books, Faybelle has 7 fairies that act sort-of like her minions in both the villain and mean girl way. Now the reason there's 7 of them is probably because there are 7 fairy godmothers in some versions of Sleeping Beauty, but that feels like too many characters to juggle, and they don’t really get a role in the story outside of acting as yes men for Faybelle. Heck, I don’t even think they get names. So in this au, Prudence and Charlotte are Faybelle’s minions/friends, forming every high school’s story stereotypical trifecta of mean girls. They carry out Faybelle’s orders, and in return get status among their peers in the villain track for being in close proximity to Faybelle. When the destiny conflict begins they are strictly on the Royal side, following Faybelle’s lead. They help Duchess in her plans to expose Ashlynn’s relationship with Hunter, and generally have it out for everyone. The two of them especially have it out for Ashlynn, but not for the reason you'd expect. You see, part of it is because it’s what the evil stepsisters are supposed to do, but part of it is also due to their own personal gripes with destiny:
Despite all her postering, Prudence really isn’t all that bad. Had she been born into a royal family like the Charming's, then she probably would have been a crown jewel due to her kinder nature. But she wasn’t, so she had to learn to be bitter and cold, to keep her emotions in and make sure the blood from her bleeding heart was never visible. It’s made especially worse by the fact that she’s the eldest of the stepsisters. People look at her not just as the future henchman to her mother, but also the future Wicked Stepmother, which put’s lot more pressure on her to keep it all in. Becoming faybelle’s minion helps to relieve some of this pressure as it takes the expectation to be the main evil off her when they're in a room together, but nothing can distract from the other destiny related pressure she has. You see, something many people in Ever After seem to forget is that not only does Cinderella’s mother have to die for the story to continue, but the Wicked Stepsisters father also has to die. The Wicked Stepmother is a widow after all. Cinderella’s mother becomes a magic tree. She’s dead in the flesh sense only, but still gets to interact with her daughter in some way, granting her magic dresses and the like. But Prudence’s father is just dead. Died when she was five, and there was no magic tree that awaited him. He’s gone, and in a few years whoever Prudence marries will be gone too, a fact that haunts her as she has been told time and time again by her weeping mother to never marry for love. Prudence like most of the royal villains believes she has a noble role, as without the Wicked Stepfamily the tale of Cinderella would never exist. But sometimes when the pressure of being evil gets too high, and her grief gets too overpowering, Prudence releases her that pain onto whoever is closest, which tends to be either her sister or Ashlynn.
Charlotte is definitely the angrier of the two. A year and a half younger than Prudence, her family had her start school early to keep them in the same grade, but despite this she is old enough to understand the lesser talked about implications of her destiny. She knows deep down that it’s unfair that she and Prudence will eventually end up disabled at the end of the story for villainy that they were supposed to do, but buries that feeling underneath a mantra of “life’s not fair, so just deal with it”. She repeats it over and over, because she needs to believe it’s true. She isn’t allowed to play book-ball because her mother insists it isn’t proper for a lady. Life’s not fair, so just deal with it. Faybelle treats them more like pets that can perform tricks than friends sometimes. Life’s not fair, so just deal with it. She sometimes spends hours at a time late at night letting her eye’s roam her room, wondering how much of her eyesight she’ll lose; her mother only lost about half thanks to her reinforced spectacles, but it varies from cycle to cycle. Life’s not fair, so just deal with it. Her dad is dead. She was too young to really remember him. Life’s not fair, so just deal with it. Her soft-hearted older sister, who takes care of pet beetle’s and dances with such serenity on her face and apologizes for fighting with her by sewing her little gifts is going to be forced to deal with double the amount of vitriol and grief than Charlotte would because she was unlucky enough to be born first. Charlotte would tear out her soul and offer it to the worst of devils if it meant she could switch their places. But Life’s not fair, so just deal with it. It just happens to be that since it’s socially acceptable, tormenting Ashlynn is just Charlotte’s preferred way of dealing with it.
As for Ashlynn, I detailed some of it in the above linked post, but beyond that I really just want to let her do dumb teen things. I mean, she runs a business in high school, has the death-not-death of both her mother and herself hanging over her head, and is all the while dealing with sharing the role of the “responsible” one in her friend group with Apple. The amount of pressure she is under would be enough to make a grain of sand skip pearl and turn straight into a miniature black hole. My interpretation of Ashlynn is that prior to legacy day, Ashlynn was dealing with her emotions in a similar but more socially acceptable way to Briar, always moving and never stopping so the emotions can’t reach her, but with things like running her business rather than partying. But ever since legacy day moving at that breakneck pace has been harder and harder. She doesn’t know if the destiny system is real or not, she isn’t 100% sure if it would be more moral to suffer for the good of the whole, she can’t be certain if she can picture a life without the Cinderella story. The two things she is certain of are that she doesn’t want to lose her mom, and she loves Hunter. And this mixture of catastrophic pressure and teenage mindset leads her to a breaking point where she and Hunter run away for a short while during true hearts day. They are eventually brought back to the school by a “through the woods” style rescue party of their friends (that’s right, the timeline is in my grubby little hands now, I'm rearranging all the plot points). But after being brought back Ashlynn starts to pull back from taking on so many responsibilities. There's only so much one girl can take after all.
Or well, in this case, three.
