A/N: This is the earliest fic in the Joker series, it's based loosely on an RL event early in WWI - the Siege of Tsingtau by French/British/Russian/Japanese troops when the area was held by Germany - so it takes place in October of 1914.

They met the other troops outside Weifang, the closet town of decent size outside of German lands. The Colonel had complained all the way there because they had had to take almost as many translators as troops, and they soon found that the same was true for the others as well. Some of the British spoke French, some of the Russians spoke English, but in general only the translators could speak freely with anyone but their own comrades.

It was a disaster. Four countries, four methodologies, and everyone watching for betrayal. In the end, they'd gotten caught because the men they'd sent in to Tsingtau were tripped up. They had no warning, just the slow realisation that the troops were being picked off. The British were the first to realise, and they quietly sent out a small group with the information they had managed to collect to escape to the north west.

It took a week: a week of people leaving to get supplies and not coming back; a week of missed meetings; a week of dead bodies being found with foreign dogtags under their shirts; a week of whispering by the locals. By the end of that week they had been decimated, two of the French had managed to make a supply run to a nearby town and got word back to the rest of them that they were retreating toward the border. The rest had been killed, and Yuuki has to careful keep record of who didn't check in, whose body had been found in a back alley, who didn't return in the morning.

Soon, he is last one left. He doesn't know if they didn't find him, or if they left him alive on purpose.

In a last ditch, desperate attempt, he throws away his pride. Sheds the uniform he'd been so proud of, stuffs the marks of his station into the tips of his shoes and dresses in the rags of the local peasants. He smears his face with dirt, and keeps his head down. The only things he keeps with him is the log of his squads orders and actions and a small pen, he keeps them bound flat to his stomach with the shreds of his old shirt, and a small pouch of money.

He walks his way out, doesn't get on trains or hail cabs. He does everything he can to just be a filthy peasant. Yuuki learns quickly to play up a limp and a cough after he gets one to many sideways glances and realises that he looks like he should have been drafted. He lets his hair grow out ragged to cover his eyes, speaks little to hide his origins and eventually sneaks his way onto a cargo ship bound for Japan.

Being back on home soil is both a relief so intense it threatens to bring him to his knees, and the most frightening prospect yet. It's been too long, he's probably been marked as KIA like the rest of his squad, and the only proof he has of his identity is a log, and tags he could have filched of the body of the 'real' Warrant Officer Yuuki. He spends his first night in Japan curled up into a ball behind a warehouse in the docks, too jittery to really sleep.

The next morning he heads away from the port town, in the country it's easy to hide, and he can chance hiding the log while he bathes in a stream. He hasn't been able to wash since he left China, four days and he can smell himself over the dirt and the smell of salt and seaweed that had permeated the hold.

Months later, when he's been formally reinstated after undergoing thorough investigation and interrogation, Yuuki is assigned to a new squad and a new mission. It goes smoothly, as much as they ever do, but after the hell his last turned into, well. This one gives Yuuki plenty of opportunities to watch. He watches the enemy, his fellow officers, the soldiers in their squads, he watches the civilians: rich and poor alike. He watches and learns.

Yuuki becomes hyper aware, during that mission, of the people no one else watches. The ones who are implicitly trusted, the ones who are treated with automatic disdain. Each type is different, but they all have one common thread, these are the people who are ignored when it comes to the so-called 'secrets' of the rich and important. The houseboys, the beggars, the doormen and the waitresses. The kind young boy who's helped the blacksmith for months now, the old lady who's done the laundry for the big house for years.

The people who collect secrets.

He watches the way the locals stiffen up when his squad comes through, as if the very presence of their uniform makes them the most noticeable thing in sight. And as they occupy the focus, he sees the ones who fade into the background. See sharp eyes and ear that catalogue and store. Starts to recognise the ones who'll hold court after they leave. The ones who'll deliberate once they are all tucked up in their beds for the night.

Yuuki watches and learns and remembers. He thinks of the men who'd gone into the Tsingtau and its surrounding area to get the information they'd needed to pull off their strategy. Military men to the last, patriotic and proud, and utterly unable to completely conceal it. The kind of men who didn't look completely comfortable unless they were in a stiff collared jacket with their rank insignia proudly displayed.

He looks at the information gatherers and the secret keepers in the places his squad passes through and thinks, 'This is what they should have been. Or been able to become.'

When Yuuki had given his report, on that shit show of a mission that had left him hitching his way back to Japan around a siege, he had very carefully not implicated anyone. In words not said, hovering in the breaths between, he had asked why. Why were the 'spies' - he can barely bear to give those fools the title - so ill suited? So inflexible? Why was the Imperial Army jeopardising their campaigns and their soldiers like that?

The answer he got was just as unspoken. 'We will not stoop to cowardly tactics. Better to die with honour, than to live in shame.' And the undercurrent that ran beneath it of 'we are superior' that blinded them. Their pride, the very thing he had abandoned during his long journey home, stopped them from realising where the true potential for intelligence operatives came from.

It didn't come from the military, with their stiff and proud soldiers, and it didn't come from the heirs of rich men, so sure of their worth and power. It came from the people who could bend and not break, the ones who could watch and listen while enduring. The ones who didn't need to be in the middle, the ones who could dig themselves in and wait.