Characters: Polly, Mal, Rosemary, OCs.
Rating: C

Disclaimer: The author makes no claim to owning the rights of anything to do with Terry Pratchett or Discworld.
Note: These probably need a little bit of explanation: I play Polly on an RPG, the premise of which is that people from many different canons in different worlds have been inexplicably taken out of their lives and deposited on a tropical island together. Sometimes the players get together OOC and challenge each other to write, for example, Five Things ficlets about their characters. I was challenged to "5 orders Sergeant Polly Perks regretted giving", but since in the game canon she was taken immediately upon the end of the book, there wasn't quite time for so many.

Four orders Polly didn't get the chance to give much less regret (and one she did)
by Ali

1. Polly did remember how terrifying her own first battle had been, but that didn't mean it was any time for gentleness, so she shouted "and you'll get back in there, you horrible little man, or you'll find the only thing worse for your health than the Dragoons is me," and turned the young soldier around and shoved him back into the fray. When she found him afterward with his belly half-open, she managed not to throw up, but only just.

2. "I'm going to kill her," Polly swore. Private Rosemary Kathmann might well be one of her favorite recruits, but a cock-up like this could go a long way toward making you forget that.

"In her defense, sarge, it is Rust," Mal pointed out.

"All the worse. It's not as if she can say the man didn't have the Ankh-Morpork flag on his damn coach. Being a horrible example of a human being doesn't stop him being an ally. At least it's the rupert that'll have to explain why we gave the order to have him captured..."

3. There was no reason to regret anything. She knew she'd done right. They had enough to worry about with the First Dragoons without all the bad things that could happen to a vampire-bearing squad with the supply lines cut. But seeing the look on her corporal's face, only the thought of having to contemplate killing her again kept her from rescinding the order right away.

4. "No, Private, a reporter is not a spy. We're not allowed to shoot him."

5. When she'd written if I don't come back, she'd been thinking of the possibility of being disappeared by ordinary means, and especially of the means by which that might be prevented. But the Island didn't care about anyone's exposure, and Father and Shufti weren't to know about it, and occasionally Polly wondered how much undirected trouble that instruction might have caused. Borogravia had never been safe. She hoped desperately that she'd made it no more dangerous.