**Please keep in mind that this was written a LONG time ago; it was one of my first complete stories. If you find errors in spelling or grammar, please let me know. I'm going to keep this, and all of my other old stories, posted so I can track my crawling progress as a writer. Thank you for reading.**
"You're going WHERE?" was all James could say after his parents told him and Sirius, who was staying with them at the time, that they were going to Australia with some of their Muggle friends, the Mooremans, and couldn't take them. He was furious at them for making them stay with a non-magic relative that was so distant that their family ties stopped back in 1609. He stared unhappily out the window at the dead looking country scenery, seeing for the first time exactly how bad the drought really was.
"She's a nice, hardworking woman and you'll get along with her fine," was the last thing Mrs. Potter said as she left them standing by the old, rusty mailbox. As soon as they turned around, they doubted every word she had ever said about anything; the roof had large holes, there was no yard, but instead what appeared to be a pile of trash nearly ten feet tall that surrounded it on three sides, and the house looked like a wet cardboard box, leaning halfway toward the ground. "It's only for two weeks, after all." James and Sirius exchanged glances and went back to staring at the monstrosity in front of them.
"What the bloody hell happened here?" James asked, tilting his head to get a good look at the house, which would have looked respectable had it been when the Potters and Durges went their separate ways.
"It looks like there was either a tornado here, or Peter tried to help them fix the roof," Sirius said absentmindedly, looking at a bug that appeared to be carrying a mouse trap with several dead mice on it. "Yeah, she's a total slob. Look at that!" It stumbled and dropped the trap, which snapped on it and sprayed James' shoes with a thick green substance.
"Do you think she'll notice if we spend the two weeks out here in the bushes?" James looked thoughtful for a second, then looked back down at the bug juice that was now turning a neon orange. "That can't be good."
"I don't know about you, but I'd rather go explore the inside of the house and get real food instead of piles of dead rodents... You know I should put some of those in my trunk," Sirius replied, kicking the trap out of the way.
"Why? Is Peter rummaging through your stuff again?"
"Yeah, and he stole twenty Sickles and some odd change, the little thief. Maybe she'll have some spares in the kitchen or something," he growled, wondering what Pettigrew would do if he got one shut on his finger with a permanent sticking charm on it. James read his mind and beat him to the idea.
"Pomfrey'd just amputate it and grow him another one. What do you bet he'd do it again?" He looked genuinely amused at the idea of Peter taking too much of whatever he'd need and having to have Slughorn paged to get rid of the extra fifty fingers sticking out from his hands. He snorted and turned to look at the deserted street behind him. "We really don't have much of a choice, do we?"
"I don't think so. Shall we go in and get it over with before you end up doing something stupid?" Sirius asked, grinning. James rolled his eyes.
"When do I do anything stupid? What are you talking about?"
"Okay, you just suggested we spend two weeks living in those bushes, where we don't know what we'll find. SHE HAS BUGS AND MICE EVERYWHERE! If that's what she has in the house, what do you think she'll have in the bushes, Tarzan?" James imitated Lucius Malfoy down to the last twitch and pretended to be offended as they hiked across the yard to the door that they couldn't see over a smaller hill of unknown origin.
"It was just a thought. I told Remus not to let you read those idiotic Muggle books, told him you'd be really stupid about them later. Well, guess what, it's later and you're being stupid."
"But I LIKE annoying you, even if it means being an idiot. Remus is a lunatic, Peter's an imbecile, and you're something else entirely. Besides, the only part of those books I read is the back cover. I charmed a Quick Quotes Quill to do the rest. Don't tell him that, though. He'd kill me and stuff me in a hole in the ground because I took one for three months since I knew he'd need it, just to see what he'd do." Sirius smirked and James burst out laughing when he remembered Lily throwing it in the fire and Remus chasing both of them down into the Great Hall and halfway to the forest.
"What's so funny?"
"You are, Padfoot, because you're too dimwitted for your own good," James said, sliding all the way down the far side of the mound of mystery. Sirius simply jumped from the top and missed landing on him by only a few inches.
"Pity. That would have been a good piece of revenge for you letting Peter..." The front door swung open and an old woman with a walker and a cigarette in her mouth came toward them.
"What are you doing? Get in there before somebody sees you!" she screamed, nearly dropping the cigarette on her multishaded brown rabbit slippers that James thought must have been either white or pink at some point. "Go on, get in the house before I have to hit you a good one!" They both dodged the scarred metal walker just as it started to make its way off of the ground.
"That must be Estrella, then," he muttered as he walked through the door. The room beyond was in such disrepair and cluttered with junk that he couldn't even make out which room it was supposed to be.
"She looks like she could have been the reason your family split up back then," Sirius added, hearing something crunch under his shoe and finding a pile of chicken bones. James made a noise like he was about to gag and walked into the second room. He could tell this was the kitchen because of all of the rusty pans that littered the floor and counter and the layers of what appeared to be food stuck on the floor. A fluffy white cat stood on the counter, hissing and spitting at them and Sirius growled, making it run through a large hole in the wall that seemed to lead outside.
"Your first job is to clean up this mess in the kitchen, polish the table twice to get everything off of it, and paint the walls in the dining room over there before my niece and cousins get here next week; don't EVEN think that this is the end of your chores because you're sadly mistaken. Don't forget the dishes from last week over there in the corner by the television in that room. You," she said, pointing at James and at the wall and buckets of paint," don't take that wallpaper off, hear me? If I find one flake of wallpaper on my carpet, you'll be as dead as the mice in the cupboard!" With that, she turned and went to the back of the house, where they heard her snoring a few minutes later.
"Really pleasant, isn't she?" Sirius asked, looking at what might have been petrified food stuck to the ceiling in several spots.
"Yeah, she's the best unknown and possibly non-existent aunt ever."