Disclaimer: Mass Effect and all related concepts and characters belong to Bioware; I'm just playing in their sandbox.
Series: Downtime
Notes: I admit I'm vastly more comfortable writing for female characters, but I'm trying to change that, so trying to get into Jacob's head was a good exercise. While I don't count myself a Jacob fan, I do like him and think that the Normandy's Only Sane Man deserves a little more positive attention from the fandom. Also, it's been a really long time since my middle school music lessons, so I apologize in advance for any mistakes.

Jacob did his best to keep to a regular morning schedule: up at 0500 ship time, calisthenics until 0630, quick shave and shower, and then finally a breakfast consisting of eggs over easy, bacon (he had no idea who Shepard and Gardner had to bribe in order to get actual pork bacon), toast, orange juice, and lots of coffee (milk, no sugar). By 0700 he'd be out of the mess hall and onto the elevator up to the CIC, yet another mug of coffee clutched firmly in hand, and it'd be into the refuge of the armory until lunch or whenever it was time to kick Collector (or merc, or geth) ass, whichever came first.

However, his shift technically didn't begin until 0800, so he still had an hour to kill before he needed to start looking over his shoulder for when Shepard started nosing around on her morning rounds.

(Jacob had nothing but respect for the commander, but ever since the mission had started he had begun to wonder if maybe something had gone wrong with the Lazarus Project and if Shepard didn't have a few screws loose with the way she baby-talked to her sniper rifles.

"Nah, she's always done that, just normally where no one can see her and write her up for a psych evaluation," Garrus had cheerfully said after overhearing him mutter about it one day. "Consider it her weird way of saying you're an all right sort."

Okay, while that did make him feel a little bit better, that didn't stop him from looking askance at the commander when she was in the middle of weapons' maintenance.)

Jacob shook his head to clear his thoughts as he walked into the armory. It was way too early in the morning to be thinking about Shepard's special brand of crazy.

He set his coffee mug in an out of the way corner of his usual worktable and headed to one of the larger lockers in the back where he stored a few of his personal effects. He keyed in the code for the lock and after the door clicked open and swung out, reached in, and pulled out an old-fashioned hard shell leather guitar case. Setting the case on the table next to the locker, he opened the clasps with a practiced flick of his wrists and pulled out an acoustic guitar.

According to his grandfather it had belonged in the family for well over a hundred fifty years, though supposedly it had spent a great deal of that time in its case because not everyone in the family had been musically inclined. Jacob wasn't entirely sure he believed the story: the instrument was in excellent condition compared to many modern acoustics and it didn't seem plausible that such an object could survive the chaos of the Second American Civil War and the decades following without taking a heavy beating. Still, it was at least a few generations old, since this was the same guitar Mom had taught him with when he was a kid, and what Grandpa had used to teach Mom, and it hadn't changed at all over the years. The same beautiful Sitka spruce and mahogany for the body and neck, ebony fingerboard and bridge, bone nut and saddle… The only new thing about it was the steel strings, which he had replaced a few months ago.

Time for his favorite part of his morning routine.

Jacob sat down on a bench and settled the guitar in his lap, plucking a few strings experimentally. The A-string sounded a little flat, so he carefully fiddled with the tuner and plucked the A-string at the same time, stopping once it came into tune. Satisfied, he began the first of his scales, C-major.

He moved swiftly up and down the scale, fingers flashing over the frets; after C he went on to C-sharp, then D, and on down the line until he'd completed all the major scales. Major scales completed, he moved on to the minor scales, then onto the more complicated chords. Even after years of practice, he still had to think when doing barre chords – some of the fingerings had always felt awkward to him.

("Boy, you do not get to complain about awkward fingerings until you pick up a woodwind," Grandpa had groused when he was ten. Mom had at laughed at that, but tried to see if they couldn't find a variation he found more comfortable.)

Scales and chords were important, though, as Mom and Grandpa had often told him. If he knew all of his basics, then he knew his fingerings and could play virtually anything he wanted. And though he knew they never intended it, practicing his scales and chords kept his hands limber and quick and helped improve his muscle memory, all of which were important in a firefight when his eyes needed to be on hostiles rather than his hands. He didn't like to think about that too much, though, especially while he was playing: music was all about pleasure.

He didn't feel like working his way through one of the few songs he had memorized this morning, so after he played his scales one last time, Jacob spent the rest of the hour idly strumming away and plucking out notes and chords in whatever order sounded best to him. Maybe after they got through this crazy suicide mission he'd start writing down some of the tunes kicking around in his head.