Hi friends! Thank you all so much for reading and for being so supportive of this series! I wouldn't be writing as much if it wasn't for all you precious people so I wanted to thank you one more time before the turn of the year! (I know! It's already almost 2016!) And you know what that means: another year of more Jerza! So let's end the year off right. Short and sweet piece of Jerza! :3

This is dedicated to wordslinger, just because we've been talking a ton lately and I was writing this while in our conversations about cats or baklava or maybe chickpeas and what not.


green

Just about everything was greener on the other side of Erza's fence—well except for her neighbor. He was just hot.


Erza didn't want to admit it but she was jealous to crumbly cake bits of her new next door neighbor.

It was a hard feeling to understand for the scarlet-haired and successful lawyer, who in her thirty-something years of life had never felt the threat of competition of someone taking her spot on the throne away from her for anything.

Not in how many hours she served at the nearby senior center, not in how many days a week she went out for a morning run, not in how many delicious potlucks she held at her house, not in how many children she babysat for no charge, not in how many books she lent out to neighborhood friends, not in how much candy she gave out to all the trick-or-treaters every year—

And most certainly not in how lush and green her landscaping was—at least until now.

The land directly to the right of Erza's house had never been so vegetative as it was at the moment, and the prolific plant life was encroaching on the first-place beauty of Erza's toil on her own soil—something that Erza would have never thought would be the cause of her insecurities.

After all, previously Mavis—before moving in with Zeref in Alvarez, the cul-de-sac across the town—had been living in the spot adjacent to the warrior-like superwoman, and the fair blonde for the life of her couldn't figure out why quite literally every living thing died around her—including even the determined cacti that she plotted at the corner of her house.

Yet just in the span of a month, that damn neighbor had turned the brown desert of Mavis's past attempts of landscaping into a gorgeous patch of colorful ceramics, perfectly shaped trees, and coordinated flowers that rivaled Erza's many many years of preening her front lawn.

Not to mention the grass was literally greener.

Even greener than her suppressed and curtailed envy.

And she didn't understand it at all. For one, how it was done in that short amount of time. And two, the purpose behind it all.

Was this a challenge? Why did this new adult-on-the-block need to boast a new and refreshed yard?

It was clearly just to spite her.

Erza tsked, suddenly snipping her garden shears, the scraping of metal on metal sounding out her frustrating situation.

She cast a glance across the street, catching a pregnant Lucy stepping out of her house to pick up the mail from that day. Thinking quickly, she stood up from her squat from the bushes she was trimming and made her way—shears and all—over to her friend's home.

Lucy would be able to give her more details about the neighbor. After all, Lucy was a stay-at-home author—she had to have met or at least seen their new neighbor at some point in the past five weeks.

"Oh, the new neighbor?" Lucy confirmed, putting a finger on her pink lip.

"Yeah—" Erza nodded but then stopped when seeing the blonde's eyes immediately light up.

"Oh, he's great!" the writer told Erza. "He helped me lift some packages that we got in the mail earlier this week. He's such a nice person, and when Natsu forgot to…"

Her friend's voice began to drown out in Erza's ears as the redhead seethed.

This was not happening. She was the superwoman of the neighborhood.

Her neighbor was most definitely trying to win the affection of the neighborhood—trying to take away her reputation as the "best neighbor ever," a title that she had been maintaining for many many years.

Her lips inadvertently flattened into a straight smile.

"—so yeah! He's great!" Lucy concluded. "I think you should get to know him too!"

Oh indeed Erza would get to know him.

She would get to know him as the neighbor that tried to outdo her but ultimately failed.

"I will definitely put that on my list of things to do," Erza agreed, before thanking and saying goodbye to both Lucy and the human being that was developing in Lucy's stomach.

The scarlet-haired lawyer ducked back to her side of the street and trekked back through her home before walking out into her backyard. She took a deep breath, placing her garden shears down on the outdoor table, and looked around at her well-maintained backyard, full of various fruit trees and a small vegetable plot of mostly tomatoes.

Something very out of place caught her attention.

There was an interruption in her perimeter of white fencing—a splinter of oak brown wood, a break in the once-pristine wood.

She wasn't sure how her fence was damaged or exactly when it happened or for how long it went without her observant eyes noticing but the one thing she knew was that she had to get that fixed.

Erza mentally moved 'fixing the fault in her fence' up to the top of her to-do list, replacing 'destroying her neighbor's momentum to becoming the best neighbor ever.'

She approaching the damage in the fence, crouching down to examine potential causes for the imperfection. The hole was about the size of her index finger, and it seemed like the part of the wooden panel had just been sliced off—and sliced off unevenly at that.

The redhead peered closer at the splintered wood, eyebrows furrowed, but suddenly realized that if she just shifted her focal perspective, she frankly had the best vantage point for investigating her neighbor.

And tried as she might, she couldn't resist taking a peek through the hole at the other side, and she fumed just imagining what the oh-so-perfect resident next door had in his backyard:

Probably had a fountain spewing crystal geyser blue water into a gorgeous pink-green lily pad mosaic of a pond with large healthy and well-fed koi.

Probably a Zen garden full of polished smooth stones and pure white Caribbean sand, untouched and ready for peaceful meditation or reclusive thinking.

Probably a pool that reflected the heavens surrounded by the most eco-friendly lawn furniture, including a well-cleaned grill and an outdoor wood brick oven.

She boiled, her eyes immediately darting to the porch, deciding to start from the backend of the house before she took in the glory of the rest of her neighbor's backyard. The back door swung open suddenly and she glared at her competition, staring him down.

He was the sworn enemy, the threat to her position as the best neighbor ever. He was—

Oh.

Was what she breathed out upon seeing her neighbor. She could quite literally feel her pupils dilating as she watched him step out barefoot onto his backyard porch, the acrid feelings that she had been broiling within slowly dissipating into mush.

She might have licked her lips, in the same way that she would have savored a last bite of cheesecake.

And damn it all because her rational and logic-trained legal head suddenly felt warm and fuzzy.

Of course he was put together—holding a pair of red kitchen scissors in his right hand, caressing the stems of a windowsill basil plant up to the sunlight before snipping off the amount he needed for what definitely smelled like red marinara sauce.

Of course he was gentle and kind—smiling down at the stray cat that had pawed its way up the two steps to where he was standing and kneeling down to pet the feline on the head, eliciting a cute mewl and soft purr from the animal.

Of course he had to be handsome—with dark blue tresses and a clean shave cut, chiseled jaw and a thin lips that looked like they could wipe anyone off their feet with a simple smirk and a complementary wink with those soft brown kind eyes and thick lashes.

And of course he had to be shirtless—showing off a heavenly body complete with well-formed arms, a defined collarbone and matching shoulder blades, and a sleek torso whose lightly rippled muscles screamed to be kissed all the way down to his…comfortable waist-hugging gray sweatpants.

Well, she thought to herself. Perhaps this fence didn't need to be fixed just yet.


Oh. This didn't turn out so short after all. Lol. Whoops. Sorry.

Ah, well, let me know what you think! Enjoy the rest of your holiday season! (Although some of us have to get back to work tomorrow morning...)

thir13enth