A/N: HELLO THERE, and welcome to the first chapter of HALFWAY BETWEEN RED AND MAGENTA. Hopefully as we go along I'll explain more about the characters, but this will be a romance novel with themes of mental health and physical illness at university. 

Media is "Breathe" by Ioish on deviantArt. 

Enjoy!

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Do you ever wonder how hard your heart works?

Sometimes, when I fill a particularly hot bath and I feel my blood pounding in my arteries, I think about those beats. Or, when I'm idling away time on a long bus journey, and my hand finds my pulse on my wrist, and I count the thumps in my radial artery rather than the seconds that pass.

And sometimes, when the days are hard, I feel my wrists and wonder what it would be like to watch my blood ooze out in those beats, to watch life drain with each pump, the precise opposite of what my heart is trying to achieve.

My heart beats eighty times every minute. My little sister, Carrie, has a condition that makes her heart beat extremely quickly at intervals, which means her heart works even harder than mine does. It probably makes up for the fact she glides through life seemingly without any effort at all. At eighteen, she's heading off to Cambridge with her triple A-star grades and her Head Girl badge and her grade eight cello. Let's not forget to add in the fact that Carrie set up her own charity, 'Headcase', two years ago, and runs marathons to raise awareness for it.

I think I broke more of a sweat jogging alongside Carrie to greet her at the marathon's finish line than she did through the whole run.

So, fast heart beats excluded, mine beats an average of eighty times per minute. If I'm feeling very philosophical, I get out my phone's calculator and note that eighty times by sixty is four thousand eight hundred times every hour. Four thousand eight hundred. I try to imagine that number in different currencies. Four thousand eight hundred pounds, for example. Or four thousand eight hundred friends. Four thousand eight hundred miles.

My heart makes a lot of effort every hour. Then I multiply that number by twenty-four and my total counts for the day is one hundred and fifteen thousand two hundred beats.

If someone told me I had to perform an action one hundred and fifteen thousand times per day, I would absolutely refuse. But my heart doesn't have much of a choice. It beats on and on and on, and never gets tired. And I wish, at times, that my brain was a lot more like my heart.

Everyone is obsessed with broken hearts. I think a broken brain is much worse. A broken heart can still beat four thousand eight hundred times. A broken brain makes you want to tear open your arteries and watch those four thousand eight hundred beats drain your life away.

I don't say any of this, however, to my mum. She's on the phone, wanting to know how I'm doing. She says it in the tone that I know what she's really asking: have you lost it again, Rosaria? Do you want to kill yourself today, Rosaria?

'Can you describe that to me, Rosaria?'

'What makes you think that, Rosaria?'

Her question brings back all those other questions I've never been properly able to answer. The psychiatrists' clinical curiosity. For someone who thinks she's eloquent with her words, I sure struggle to put my own feelings into them.

'No, I haven't eaten yet,' I say, and I can't help but smile. It's such a motherly question.

'You know you've got to keep up with your iron intake...' Mum starts to fuss once more. I turned vegetarian shortly before I was hospitalised, although not for the same reasons, of course. But Mum's in the habit of still believing that eating some red meat might make me whole again, somehow.

I haven't been whole since I sliced open my wrists. But we'll come to that later.

'I'm having a whole bag of spinach tonight,' I promise, and I grin even though she can't see me. I shift my position, settling in for the long phone call into a comfortable position, back against my pillows. My legs are crossed as I sit astride my bed, with the freshly laundered sheets of a pattern I picked out from a rather nerdy aesthetic website. The lights of the aurora borealis shower more sparks across my bed than any other activity in it, sadly. Somehow, I wasn't sure any human activity could quite compete with the electron-charged elements being hit by solar winds at a million miles per hour. Art and science blending at their finest, each with their own representative colour. Green and red for oxygen, purple and blue for nitrogen.

'Well make sure you send me a Snapchat, so I can see you're telling the truth!' At fifty-two going on thirty, my mum hasn't yet realised that social media isn't for the purpose of photographing dinner, nor for keeping an eye on your daughters whilst they go to university.

'Yes, yes,' I agree, although my focus is already moving, assessing what else in my room needs unpacking. It's the start of term on Monday, and I've just moved in my new student house for our final year.

My bookcase— undoubtedly the most important thing in my room— is already neat and perfect, although I regularly change the order in which I file the books on the shelf when I grow bored. I have precisely two hundred and eight books, not including medical ones for my university course. Those sit on a separate, solemn shelf, away from the fun. My happy shelf of books is filled with signed autographs of my favourite authors, figurines from the shows, fairy lights, candles (unlit, mainly for decoration), and even a couple of my own fanart. Even before I was sectioned, my life only brightened between the pages of the books I read. Want to quickly exit your life and take part in another? There's nothing more magical than finding a book that sucks you in, heart and soul.

I even put a picture of me and Dre meeting Leandro Melendez, who plays my all-time favourite character. Leandro plays Sebastian, a beautiful, dark-haired villain who nobody else believes in but me and an online community, which I may or may not be an avid member of. In the photo, I'm so happy I'm almost crying, whilst Dre looks like she's contemplating what to have for lunch. Leandro, in the centre, is his usual charming and smiling self, with curling black hair and teeth so white they don't even need Photoshop.

'Rosaria! You're not listening!'

I snap back to the present, and fervently deny thinking about anything other than my mother's words.

'What was I saying?' she says, trying to catch me out.

'We're dropping off Carrie in the morning at her new home, and she would like to Skype you once she's settled in.' I repeat the sentence with a shrug, with all the same nuances that my mum had done. I swear I can hear her roll her eyes.

'Smart arse,' she says, but she says it affectionately. 'Is anyone else in the house yet?'

'Not at the moment,' I say, lying back onto my bed. 'Dre's gone out jogging, Daya's got a family party this weekend and will be back late tomorrow night. And then we have two new people. I have no idea when they're turning up.'

'You must know their names?' Mum almost speaks with worry, as if this bodes bad news. Well, I've secluded myself in the past. Making friends has never been my best talent.

'Daya and Kamila,' I say, soothing her. 'They're both from the year below; in Dre's year.'

'They're in your year now, honey,' Mum's voice turns a little distant; I hear her leaning away from the phone to say something to my dad.

'As if I could forget,' the irony laces through my murmur. My mum snaps back to the phone, on guard in an instant.

'There is nothing shameful about what happened last year!' she says fervently, and I can hear my dad agreeing in the background, whilst simultaneously flicking through sports channels. The sound of the kettle whistles, and I have a sudden, uncontrollable urge to go home, take a seat on the loveseat in the kitchen, and wrap my feet inside the blanket Carrie and I knitted for Mum one Christmas, together. We knitted it with our arms, and we laughed so hard during the process that there's quite a few bobbles in it.

I clutch my hand over my stomach as if to grasp the homesickness and expel it physically in my fist.

It doesn't work.

'I'm not embarrassed,' I say quickly, because I'm not. "Embarrassed" would not adequately describe how I feel towards my year out. People took years out of medical school for all sorts of reasons. Dre, who had initially started in the same year as me, had taken time out in third year to help with her dad, who was diagnosed with cancer. She missed too many months to catch up, and instead retook her third year, and I'd gone into fourth year without her. That's how she met Daya.

But the reason I took time off was because of an extremely public incident.