Harper belongs to @yanara126. Thank you for submitting!! I’m very happy to have her on the blog :)
Class - Infiltrator (she develops weak biotics after being rebuilt by Cerberus).
Lover(s) - Had a relationship with Liara during the first game, but later fell in love with Tali.
Best Friend(s) - She could never choose between her children.
Harper is the daughter of Hannah Shepard and Viola Hackett (Admiral Hackett’s daughter), and so lived much of her life on spaceships. Due to her mothers’ different stations she often had to choose between them, not seeing the other for several months or sometimes weeks. These long and frequent separations eventually cause her mothers’ to drift apart. They eventually peacefully divorced when Harper was 17 and had moved in with her grandparents for a year to finish her education on earth. She still has a good relationship to both her mothers and her still living grandfather, though of course chain of command can make it a bit awkward at times.
Her hobby is music in general and the harp and violin in specific. She’d always been drawn to intruments plays quite a few of them at least on a basic level but eventually settled on, much to her mothers’ amusement, the harp and later the violin. She briefly considered a career as a stage musician but quickly decided to follow her family’s footsteps.
Harper is naturally somewhat melancholic, not helped by trauma that just keeps piling up for her. She is calm, collected and a natural leader and diplomat though she is perfectly capable of agression if she thinks it appropriate. This is paticularily relevant when interacting with krogans, since krogan diplomacy does often involve some degree of violence. She has certainly headbutted a few of them. Due to both her personality and what happened on Elysium she finds it difficult to surrender responsibility to someone else, preferring instead to be personally involved in pretty much everything, for better or worse. She is compassionate and friendly but does expect a degree a of discipline from her crew. That said, she is not above jokes, and eventually got a water spritz bottle specifically for the purpose of using it on Garrus when he said or did something she considered stupid (like suggesting killing hostages, we do not do that here, Garrus). She called it a pedagogical tool. Overtime it became and in joke with Garrus and the whole crew, and Garrus would repeated try and fail to steal the bottle from her. She values her crewmates deeply, makes it a point to have a friendly relationship with all of them, often becoming much more than just a superior to them (or employee in some cases).
She developed a relationship with Liara during the first game. She doesn’t tend to look very far into the future, always very acutely aware of her own mortality sometimes to an obsessive degree, but had life proceeded somewhat normally and had Liara eventually asked to settle down she wouldn’t have said no. When she met Liara again after dying and being revived by Cerberus she was initially overjoyed but soon noticed that Liara was simply emotionally unavailable at that point. It hurt her quite a bit, but at that point she had already started to process that it had been two years for everyone else and she couldn’t really blame her. Assuming that Liara had started a relationship with Feron in the meantime, she vowed to help her save her new boyfriend and move on from their prior relationship.
Now, Tali had developed a bit of a hero crush on Harper during the first game, which she very slowly painfully overcame when she grieved her over the two years prior. Nonetheless, the chemistry remained and though Tali once again found herself drawn to Harper, albeit in a more mature and less heroworshipping way. The two grew closer over the course of the Collector mission and eventually got into a relationship, which lasts even past the war with the reapers. (@yanara126 has quite a few headcanons for what they do after the games, but that is a behemoth for another post).
