Summary: Sullivan Hooper knows that he's not normal, but is he willing to accept what his real identity is? Follow his adventure as he attempts to unlock his past.

Disclaimer: Sucker Punch owns Sly Cooper. I own the story.

Chapter 1: Meet Sullivan Hooper

He was playing in the desert at night. Well, not exactly playing, but he was doing something fast and enjoyable similar to it. It was a mixture of dodging non-existent blows and dancing. The desert wasn't really a desert, either; just a wide expanse of rolling hills. Was it covered in sand, dirt, or grass? He couldn't tell; some things you just can't tell with dreams. There were some pyramids, shrunk down to size, and there was a street of a Wild West town, and over there was a couple of shrunken down Chinese temples. The moon was enormous and full over head, bathing everything in a mystic blue light. Some how, all these things were connected.

But right now, he was running among them and other fun-sized environments, jumping up on trash cans and cars and running along clothes lines between buildings like some over-caffeinated kid. This was fun and exciting! Any moment now, the police would show up behind him, their sirens wailing for him to stop it and Carmelita would be there, shooting at him with her bazooka and making the chase all the more enjoyable.

He whooped and jumped in the air, doing a front-flip even as he spun around and landed in a crouch on top of a fence at the end of an ally way, facing Carmelita and her gang. But he was too slow and the dream became a nightmare.

Red laser shots flew by over Carmelita's head, striking Sullivan in the shoulder and knocking him backwards off the fence and into a black abyss there. He felt something flowing out of him, something more important than blood or life, being sucked into the darkness and making him old and weak, making him dumb and normal, making him… making him…

"Sullivan, wake up!"

Sullivan Hooper woke up with a jerk, cold sweat soaking his grey fur and his large ears perked up in terror. Standing over him was his room mate, keeper, and ever attractive friend, Inspector Carmelita Fox, a gorgeous vixen with indigo-black hair. Currently, she was standing over his bed in her red night gown, shaking him awake from his nightmare, which was already nothing but a distant impression as his foggy mind woke up. Sullivan looked around and found himself not in the strange desert landscape, but in his own bland little room in New York City, New York. There was his closet and his dresser, only half-full with his small wardrobe, and there was his out fit laid out for him for his next day of work as an accountant at the local bank. To his right, the north, there was a balcony over looking the streets below. Very little else decorated the room.

"W-What happened? Was I talking in my sleep again, Caramel?" Sullivan asked.

Carmelita smiled down at the raccoon man for using her pet name and joked, "Talking? More like screaming! This time you kept moaning like some ghost! Almost made me start waking up shooting…"

"Burnt tail hair for breakfast, yuck," Sullivan chuckled.

"Better than what you cook, He-Who-Burns-Lettuce!"

"Hey, I thought it would be a nice touch to warm it up a little!"

"In a frying pan on the oven?"

"Don't make me remind you of the time you tried cooking a gourmet meal for the land lord in less than half an hour."

"Will our neighbors ever forgive us for the smell?"

"No."

The both laughed over the fond memories.

Sullivan Hooper was eternally grateful to Carmelita Fox for taking him in. Ever since he had woken up one day with no memory of his past in a hospital in Hawaii five months ago, he had been absolutely helpless. No one had claimed him at the hospital, no one had any recorded knowledge of him, and no one knew him, not even himself. He had been a creation of nothing. Carmelita had been there to take care of him and try finding his family or at least friends, but no one knew anything of him. Hence, when nothing could be found of his past, Carmelita had helped him reconstruct his life by adopting him a new name, getting him a job, and allowing him to live with her. He was strangely good at numbers, which helped greatly with his job as an accountant. She and he were best friends and life seemed pretty good for the amnesia patient.

Yet, there were some holes Sullivan just couldn't repair. First, he was clumsy. Seriously, he was so clumsy that he could trip on air. All of Carmelita's dishware was of plastic for that reason. He also couldn't think clearly on most days. Everything just seemed to be in a slow motion fog that made him somewhat dull or simply bored.

He couldn't ever decide on what to wear, for another thing. Everything he saw just seemed to dull or just off on him and hence, he almost always wore his near-identical work suits every where, even to party events. In some cases, Carmelita had had to buy him a casual out fit or two just so he wouldn't look so stiff at parties, even though he always wound up being a charming host or guest. Another thing in his fashion taste was that he always wore sunglasses, feeling naked with out them. He never knew why, he just always wore regular sunglasses to cover his eyes that would other wise make him feel nervous, twitchy, and nude. Hence, no one really knew what Sullivan's face looked like, unadorned, and he had even been mistaken for a blind man on the days when the fog had been thick enough in his mind to make him an idiot.

Then there was Sullivan's restlessness. Every day he would wake up, feeling something odd about seeing the sun before noon, and he would get through his day, always feeling like something big was about to happen. This feeling would reach fever pitch as the sun went down and on most nights, it was extremely difficult for him to even get to sleep as he would suddenly feel an overwhelming desire to exercise or do some sort of extreme physical activity. This had been cured somewhat when he joined an amateur hockey team, which usually practiced hard enough to make him too tired for night time activities. Carmelita had been in disapproval of this, considering that there was a gambling ring around the underground hockey game. But she put up with it, just being grateful that she could go to sleep without having Sullivan waking her up in the middle of the night for a pillow fight or a movie or something. Honestly, he was such a little kid sometimes…

But the worst of the holes in Sullivan's reconstructed life were his nightmares. They would always start pleasant enough with him playing in some night-time setting or building a puzzle, but it would always turn into a nightmare. The puzzle block he played with would become a metal monster attacking him in an enclosed space. The playing would become running from something that wanted to change him in a bad way. But the nightmares never ended with him being bloodied or dying or almost dying. They ended in a way that was worst, according to Sullivan; he would be falling in darkness and his very essence, something of utter importance, would be taken from him. That feeling of loss of something as important as his identity… that was the worst part of the nightmares.

Now, Sullivan's laughter died and in the silence, he stared at the balcony with a sad look in his eyes. He wanted to stand on the balcony, but standing didn't seem like enough. Maybe he should decorate it with lanterns? Yeah, little Chinese colored lanterns to brighten it up, but was it enough?

"Are you thinking about lanterns again?" Carmelita yawned, lying down in the bed beside Sullivan.

"Is it that obvious?" Sullivan chuckled, inching to the side to make room for her.

"You wouldn't stop talking about it for the past three weeks over dinner," Carmelita said, pausing briefly to yawn again. She snuggled into the blankets as she mumbled, "Maybe you'll shut up if we just get some lanterns already. Maybe some tiny Japanese ones…"

"Yeah, blue ones," Sullivan muttered.

Sullivan didn't notice Carmelita's ear perk up in worry, but she was tired and her eyes closed as

She drifted away into sleep. Sullivan smiled and stroked her dark hair, watching her beautiful face rest in such a calm, peaceful expression. It was a pretty face, but not as attractive as when she was angry. He had seen it gnashing in anger when she stomped home on some nights, down right angry that some idiot at Interpol had poked fun at her for being a female detective, or the fact that some criminal had slipped away yet again. Crime rates were going up again, now that Sullivan remembered it. He wondered what had been keeping them down before.

With these unrelated thoughts drifting around in Sullivan's foggy mind, he drifted to sleep with his arm around Carmelita's shoulders, bathed in night silence and inches from her dark embrace.