A/N: Chapter two! Not much happens in this one, but I swear, a plot is coming (checks calendar guiltily). Yes.

Wilson is tired of take out. He is tired of cheeseburgers, fish fillets, greasy yellow fries and the stiff sound of crinkling paper as his latest missile misses its target, bouncing off the rim of the plastic hotel waste bin to join its fellows in a haggard ring around the seemingly ineffective trash receptacle. He is tired of living out of a suitcase, and he wants to go home.

One problem. He has no home to go to.

Quietly, Wilson slips into the bathroom and turns on the light. Slowly turning his head from side to side, he appraises his figure from all angles, carefully examining his features, the way the lines at the corners of his eyes seem to deepen the closer they get to the heart of his face, the way his mouth droops without him knowing when he is not consciously lifting the edges. The shadows gather surreptitiously in the hollows of his cheeks; he looks like a plague – as if malady, perhaps, or sorrow, escaped from Pandora's Box and played savage games across the landscape of his features.

House would tell him to stop being such a diva, but he would also tell him that he belonged on his couch, or at least in his kitchen, cooking him up exquisite concoctions at his every whim. Has told him this. This kind of smile, at least, reaches his eyes, reminds him that he is a human being, and worth loving, for all his faults and creases. He has been around a long time, after all, and is used to bending along the same lines. It is comfortable, and reassuring, but Wilson is not comforted, and his is not reassured, in all honesty, that he can take much more of this.

Shutting off the light, he closes the bathroom door behind him, exits slowly. He neatens his work clothes, smoothing their wrinkles and carefully draping them over the back of a chair before continuing on to restore the fast food wrappers to their allocated bin. He puts all his books back in the suitcase, wishing he'd borrowed a few from House when he'd left, since all these are familiar, this situation is familiar, this sadness is familiar and he'll just have to wait it out.

Tonight, instead of a two year old, the room next door is holding lovers. In their merriment they defy each and every structure on earth that seeks to confine them, a sentiment Wilson might appreciate the poetry in but little else. I am not a peeping tom, he thinks shamefully, I mean, I can't see anything, thank god, but…the sound of love is less dense than water, it is thinner than skin, stronger than bone. It cannot be kept out, not even by a down comforter and a heart of stone.

At three o clock, like every night this week, the phone rings, and Wilson does not rise to answer it. Alone in his bed he wonders why it is so nice to know that some things in his life have not changed, that some slim finger in the night continually puts to rest the silence of his slumber, driven, he dreamily imagines, by a need to connect, to connect with Wilson, with he who is lonesome, and in need of a friend.

Next door the lovers drift in a blissful doze. He wants to be with someone. He wonders how House can stand it. He is tired of being alone.