Clinton F. Barton was learning to walk when his parents noticed that there was something wrong with his legs. They looked funny, his feet would point inwards and his legs themselves looked...well..'bent'.

They took him to the doctor and they were told that Clint had bowed legs and would need to wear metal leg braces for the rest of his life, to make sure his legs would get straighter and that they wouldn't bow further. Nobody could tell them why though. Nobody knew. At least not until he was three years old. When Clint was three he had his first break and it was a bad one.

He and his older brother Barney, who was nine at the time, were playing on the playground. They were having so much fun, it was only when Clint decided he wanted to jump off the sand box like he could fly that things turned for the worse.

He'd jumped and then fallen on his elbow. But nobody had thought he would get hurt, it was only a few inches off the ground after all and it was padded, no normal child would've gotten hurt. But Clint wasn't normal. It was the resonating 'crack' of his arm breaking in three places that assured them of that.

It wasn't just the break that was chilling to his parents, it was the fact that he just sat there silently, not crying and eyes wide, so wide that for the first time in his short life, his parents could see that the whites of his eyes were not white but slightly tinted blue.

Osteogenesis Imperfecta Type 1...Brittle bone disease. That's what Clint had, that was the reason his legs were bowed, that his eyes were tinted blue, that on a playground toy where normal kids would barely get a scrape, that he broke his arm in three separate ways. Clint was fragile and horribly so.

It was after Clint's diagnosis that his father started drinking like a mad man, blaming himself and his faulty genes. Yet soon he discovered that it wasn't his genes that caused Clint's disease...it was his wife's.

Her uncle had had OI type 2 and died in the womb. It was her that gave Clint a disease. It was her who broke his son! His youngest son! There was a crash a few weeks later...their father had been drinking and he wrapped his car around a tree. Their mother had been on the passenger side, she was killed on impact and their father slipped into a coma and died three days later.

Both Clint and Barney were placed in the care of an orphanage. An orphanage that both children escaped from, when Clint was eleven and Barney was sixteen. The boys joined the circus and worked as set-up guys for four years, that was until Barney went under the tutelage of the world's best archer and Clint under that of the resident clown. It was during those years that Clint was the most happy, he had always loved to make people laugh and now he could.

But when Clint was seventeen, Barney betrayed him. He stole all of the money that Clint had been saving up and then he burned down the big-top...with all of their friends still inside.

Clint had still been wearing his clown makeup when Barney beat him senseless. His eye swelling closed and his mouth bleeding and mixing with the red face-paint already surrounding it. It was raining when Clint finally staggered up and out of the tent that he and Barney had once called home, Barney's old bow clutched in hand.

Clint was eighteen when he joined SHIELD and the rest is history.