Without Borrowing Starlight

[Family Healing | Prodigy x Prickly Girl | Mutual Devotion | Slow-Burn Healing HE]

#A life can collapse in a single second, but rebuilding it takes years and years#

At fourteen, Xu Jingyi fell and shattered her spine, leaving her paralyzed from the neck down.

Her youth came to an abrupt halt. Her legs were useless, and the rest of her life was locked in the tiny confines of a wheelchair.

So she could continue her studies, her father, Xu Yan, sold off the family business he had spent half his life building and quit his secure job.

In their rental apartment, unknown to anyone, he would do weighted squats again and again at five in the morning, building up his shoulders so he could carry her up countless flights of stairs, day after day.

But no one knew that on countless nights, trapped in her sealed-off room, she was consumed again and again by extreme thoughts.

Until Lu Shiyan appeared.

On the first day of class assignments at their top high school, her wheelchair got stuck at the threshold.

He came over. He didn't push her or pick her up. He crouched down to lift the front wheel and looked her in the eye. "Stuck?"

In that moment, she suddenly realized that the way he looked at her was different from everyone else's.

When someone made a tasteless joke about her disability, he was the first to rebuke them, his voice cold with anger.

When she broke down over her father's silent tears in the fire escape, he handed her a tissue without asking why.

In their final year of high school, when she was so exhausted from studying that she wanted to die, he slid a note across the aisle: "I worked out three ways to solve this problem. Which one do you want to hear?"

She thought it was pity.

Only after the college entrance exams were over did the boy, who was always so restrained, cross two cities and stand before her to say:

"Xu Jingyi, I'm not here to save you. I'm here to love you."

Theme: Pity is a handout from others. Equality is the most precious kind of tenderness.