AN: This is for venom69 who wanted to know how they know whether it's blues or greens.
Spoilers: er…vague for season six and even vaguer for season one.
Disclaimer: Not mine.
Summary: Blue and green should never be seen…
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Blue and Green Should Never Be Seen
She claimed that it had something to do with the date. If this was the case, he was pretty sure that the system accounted for such variables as fluctuations in the Earth's magnetic pole, the day of the week, the phase of the moon and the price of peas in Persepolis. It was more likely that it had to do with the fact that she was never at home to do laundry and for some reason refused to leave it to be done on the base. She claimed it was something about the detergent, but he had seen her ironing the creases on her pant legs with her fingers during briefings and was pretty sure that it was something else. Fortunately, he knew roughly how many sets of greens she had and, by employing the simple method of counting and taking into account that she thought she looked better in green (the truth was that it didn't matter), he was usually able to figure out whether to wear green or blue to work.
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Sam learned very quickly that Jonas had an infuriating habit of taking her seriously. Unfortunately, she did not learn it quickly enough and thus had to endure almost three weeks of telephone calls at ridiculous hours in the morning where he would politely inquire what colour he should wear. The first day, she told him green without thinking and then realized too late that she didn't have any greens clean. He looked heartbroken when she showed up in her blues, but she explained and he seemed to take it well. That afternoon he gave her a hopeful smile and the next morning her telephone rang at exactly 0730. After telling him blue (she still hadn't done laundry because of a thing with a generator that ate up most of her time the day before), he asked her how the telephone worked. Sam was almost late for work every day until she introduced Jonas to email and programmer her computer to send him a colour every morning.
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"Why are there two different colours, O'Neill?" Teal'c asked, quirking an eyebrow.
"Well…to give us a little sense of variety, I guess." Jack replied.
"Is not the nature of military garb on this planet to encourage unification by methods of equal dress."
"…Yes." Jack wondered what he was getting himself into. "And we have many colours of uniforms depending on what situation we are heading into."
"Are there not also khaki coloured ones?"
"No."
"But there are khaki uniforms."
"Khaki is for deserts. There isn't a desert in Cheyenne Mountain, and we don't wear these off base."
"I see."
"Anything else?" Why had he done that?
"Is there then some rule which states which colour one must wear at which time."
"Carter…has a system."
"I will ask her to enlighten me."
"Best of luck."
"I do not understand why talking to Captain Carter would require luck."
"Just…" Jack gave up. "Have you tried cake yet?"
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Now that he stayed on the base most of the time and occasionally had to wear his dress blues, it was harder to remember whether it was a green day or a blue day. This only proved ill once, while Sam was attempting to redress herself in the dark of the closet and he was attempting to prevent her from finding her clothing and she found her pants anyway, but put on his shirt without really noticing the extra space in it until she got out into the hallway and the light revealed that she was wearing blue pants with a green shirt that was too big for her. She'd made the funniest noise he'd ever heard and practically dove back into the closet to make him give up her clothing. He did.
Eventually.
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When Jack O'Neill retired from the Air Force for what he promised would be the last time, he found a box on his desk that had no tag. Inside was a set of SGC-issue BDUs. They were blue. Underneath them was a piece of paper, written on by hand and in pencil:
To J. O'Neill re: BDU Colour Selection
General, following is the formula by which is it determined what colour of BDU shall be worn by SG-1 on any given day.
Colour n x c x g x d x l
Where n is the number of Goa'uld active in the galaxy, c is the number of slices of cake eaten at lunch the previous day, g is the number of gate trips taken by SG-1, d is the number of days in the month and l is the number of days it has been since I've done laundry. Odd numbers are green, evens are blue. Now that you're no longer in the military, odd things should stop happening to you.
Happy Retirement
Your Sam.
Jack laughed so hard that he forgot to steal a piece of government property on the way out. Which was a shame, really, because he'd always liked that lamp.
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finis
GravityNotIncluded, January 10, 2007