A/N: This is my first Once Upon a Time fanfiction so please be kind to me! I will try my best to keep the characters as accurate as possible! Please enjoy. Oh and if you're a homophobe please go away.

Panic – The sensation of being confused and disoriented by the situation and space that surrounds and individual – the sensation can often be coupled with anxiety and fear. His eyes shot opened and instantly became enveloped in the insidious and toxic darkness which began wrapping itself around the boy's form. He began to struggle against the bondage he found himself in and he knew that he was having another episode. Another delusion which was brought on by some psychosis that the boy had and never got diagnosed with because he didn't want people to think he was going insane. Insanity – he didn't know if it was that he was suffering from or some predisposed mental imbalance that he knew was because of his genetics. No, this was different; this was evil, pure evil. He could feel the malicious intent reverberating from within itself. He didn't know if it was real or if it was just in his head but he could feel it extend its dark hands towards him. All he could do was watch in paralyzing fear as the tendrils of darkness wrapped their sticky and slimy appendages around him. He couldn't breathe, he couldn't scream, and he couldn't fight anymore. The darkness began infecting his soul and he could feel the corruption within himself and the idea of being evil made him shake. It made him shake with an emotion that he had never felt before and that's when he knew it was wrong. He knew that the darkness that was clawing at him couldn't win. He couldn't become corrupted by the very thing that he feared. He didn't know why he felt this way, but he knew that there was something that he had to do about it. Then it happened. Then something happened which made his eyes fly open with surprise. A light. The brightest light he had ever seen in his life and he felt a sort of warmness to it. It was familiar and he wanted to reach out to it. His hand came in contact with the light and everything exploded to white – A blinding white. Then there was nothing but whiteness and snow….snow everywhere.

"Wake up!" A voice echoed inside his head causing him to clench his head with a pain that he had never experience before. It was so excruciating and pulsating that it made him clench his teeth and scream out in a pain agony. Then within an instant the pain vanished like it was never there to begin with and he found himself lying in bed. Relief washed over him like water washing over the sandy shore come summer morn. He almost couldn't believe it was all a nightmare and he checked his wrists just to make sure that it was. It felt so real and it was almost too ridiculous to believe that it wasn't real. He looked around the large bedroom he was in with about four other boys and then his eyes fixated on the moon which was directly outside his window. It seemed like it was still nighttime which meant he wasn't asleep for all that long. He sat up and raised his hands above his head stretching before looking to the bedside table on his right. He picked up the adorable nametag one of the other children at the orphanage he was staying at made for him. He read the girly pink letters as it spelled out, "Winter Braxton," and he softly put the name tag down. By that point a smile had crawled onto his face and once he started smiling it would be hard for him to stop. The younger children at the orphanage always were able to make fifteen year old Winter smile at even the stupidest of things. He wanted to be happy for them because it gave them hope even though there wasn't any. He was painfully optimistic in that way. He was just trying to please everyone.

Winter had been at the orphanage since he could remember, but his memories were fickle if not anything else. He couldn't remember anything before age nine and anything he did remember was just random scenes, sounds, and faces that he had no coherent way of piecing together. The staff who worked at the orphanage wasn't of any help either. They said that they couldn't remember who dropped him off or how long he had been there. He found the whole situation odd because he would think that someone would have some recollection of who he was as a child. Whenever he thought about it, it just gave him anxiety and made him ultimately depressed. To him it was awful not knowing about who you are or where you came from. All the other orphans at least knew if they were abandoned or dropped off. They knew if their parents were alive or not, but Winter? He didn't know anything and it made him feel so lost and confused about everything. He tried not to think about it because he thought about it like an adventure – an adventure to find his real parents. Most of the orphans thought he was weird for fixating on his parents so much. He didn't care about doing well in school, having friends, or even trying to find a significant other. He just wanted to find out who his parents were. It was like an adventure for him because he thought that once he turned eighteen he could leave the orphanage and travel the globe trying to find them. It was apparent that he wasn't British because he didn't have an accent, but it was strange he ended up in inner city London at an orphanage. Then again his whole situation was strange.

Maybe it was his craving for an adventure which brought the shadow into his room, or maybe it was his feelings of being lonely and lacking parents which attracted it. Whatever the reason was that attracted the shadow to Winter in the first place was irrelevant, because the shadow always gets its target. No matter at what cost. Winter didn't notice the shadows crawling along the floor at first because he was too distracted by the window suddenly opening causing an echoing sound in the bedroom. His head instantly turned to the window because he knew that he had locked it and someone had to have broken in. Tentatively getting out of bed he looked towards the window, "H-Hello?" He called out softly as if he was expecting someone to respond. As he moved towards the window the air wasn't cool as it normally was. It was warm and the air smelled of the sea which was strange because they were way too far inland to be near the ocean. He could hear it though. He could hear the crashing of waves onto the shore. He didn't know how it was possible or if he was having another delusion. No, he knew that this was real. He could feel a sensation from deep within his abdomen a familiar force pulling him towards the window. He wanted to go. He wanted to go on an adventure. He wanted it now.

That's when he saw it; a forming mass of shadows forming on the wall adjacent to the window and this made Winter take in a deep breath of air. The shadows congealed together to reveal a humanoid and it didn't say anything towards Winter but just stared at him extending his hand towards him. Winter wondered if the creature wanted him to take its hand and come with it. Of course Winter was skeptical about a weird shadow creature asking for his hand. However, when they made eye contact he felt a strange compelling force pretty much attracting him towards the creature. He didn't even know if he wanted to hold his hand and if he wanted to go with him. However, he felt oddly compelled to. Like he absolutely had to move forward and grab the shadow's hand. He felt as if he needed to go with the shadow to wherever it wanted to take him. Little did he know that in that instant, in that split decision he made under the shadow's spell, he was sealing his fate for something that he never possibly imagined for. He wanted adventure and he certainly about to go on an adventure, but he wasn't going to find his parents for sure. He was going to find something much more terrifying to the young boy. He was going to find himself and he wasn't ready for what that entailed entirely. He didn't know what it would mean to be Winter Braxton. He didn't know the legacy and/or the power behind that title. He didn't even know who he was, but he knew that he wanted to go on this adventure no matter what. He knew that he had to get out of the orphanage because he knew he didn't belong there. He belonged wherever the shadow wanted to take him to. Even if he didn't know where the shadow was taking him, he wanted to go.

As soon as Winter touched the shadow's hand he felt a strange sensation between the two. There was a spark which made the creature recoil at first and stare at Winter a little bit more intently than before, but he wasn't about to leave the boy because of a strange occurrence. Winter grabbed ahold of the shadow's hand once more and that time there wasn't any sparks, and there wasn't any animosity between the two anymore. Whatever was stopping him from gripping the shadow's hand at first was gone and replaced by a conduit of confusion and magical energy that Winter wasn't even able to pick up. He watched and swore that a smile spread across the shadow's face before it gripped tightly onto his hand. He watched as tiny spindles of shadows began working their way onto his skin anchoring him to the shadow. Then in an instant they were airborne and out the window. The window closed behind them and it was silent again. Winter was beginning his adventure.