A/N: Thanks for the reviews and the well wishes. I am expecting this week to be better, because there simply cannot be too many like last week in life. I still love H&F, but it is amazing how many losses personally have coincided with this first time I've ever decided to write a death fic. The total during posting of this story now stands at three. But there were also helpful people and true friends during the same week. Thanks again to all of the readers here, too. Knowing people look forward to the chapters is a lift itself.

Down to H&F, about the will, we're not there quite yet. You'll see soon what it contains. :) About Thomas and the trials of his hurried trip back to fetch the letters, he gets his own chapter in a few on that. About House, well, he deserves his title of stubborn. However, I love Jensen, and there are several surprises still in the remainder of this story. From this chapter on, Jensen takes a more prominent position than he has for the middle part of the story and has quite a full day with House coming up on Wednesday fic time, and I hope those who have said they've missed him enjoy his return.

(H/C)

House closed the bedroom door behind him as Jensen turned to face his patient. "I already know what you're going to say," he said harshly. "You think this is a bad idea. Great, your vote is duly recorded, but it's not your decision, so thanks for playing, and you can shut up now."

Jensen studied him. It was all more visible than House realized, at least to the psychiatrist: The crackling tension, the anger, the pain both present and past, and beneath it all, buried under the others but impacting their flow, were the fear and the longing. For Jensen, the worries of last night were gone, totally forgotten in the crisis. Just now, he was focused purely on the man in front of him and dealing with the emergency, much like the evening when House, after being informed about Hadley's death, was about to walk out of his session alone and, Jensen was positive, would have killed himself through inattention driving back to Princeton. No physical risk here, but an Everest-sized mental one.

Jensen paused just enough for the delay to be slightly longer than expected. "I don't think this is a bad idea," he replied, his voice even and steady.

That at least drew House's attention. "You don't?"

"No. I think it's a horrible idea."

Ice blue defiance added another log to the fire. "Too bad what you think doesn't matter, then."

"You even think it's a bad idea yourself," Jensen said, "but you think it's the only way. That's where you're wrong. There are other approaches."

"Like what?" House limped a quick circle, his leg obviously giving him hell. He fired up again before the psychiatrist could answer. "You're just trying to delay things and waste time talking. No time for talking. I need to do something."

"What time are we wasting?" the psychiatrist asked. "Thornton went off to get the letters. Does us being here delay the schedule for the next plane back to St. Louis? Simply talking to me isn't going to stop the letters from coming or slow them down. It will, though, put off talking to Dr. Cuddy a little longer."

House hit the end of the room's meager pacing limits and snapped around again, flinching as his leg protested. Jensen deliberately sat down on the edge of the bed, projecting calmness with everything he had. "There are other approaches that accomplish the same thing," he repeated. "Furthermore, they do it with a whole lot less collateral damage. Do you remember when you decided to give yourself a crash course in court hearing preparation by throwing every trigger you could think of at yourself? Your whole family was involved by the end of that day."

"That was totally different."

"You're right. This is a far larger bombshell, and it will do far more damage. Everything you saw that night is a minor dose compared to this. Everything Dr. Cuddy felt that afternoon, and your girls felt, too, won't even be close. But there are other ways to get where you want to go."

"So tell me, Great and Psychic One, where do I want to go?" House demanded, sarcasm volume on high.

"You want to trust him," Jensen replied.

House was caught off guard by the simplicity of the statement and waited for a moment for it to expand. Jensen waited him out in silence. "I want to trust him? Bullshit. I don't even know him, and I sure as hell am not interested in trusting him. Trust is in a different galaxy than we are."

"You know him a lot better than you did last week. Far better than you did six months ago. What did your mother say in that letter?"

House took another lap of his tight pacing track. "Fill it in yourself. Standard goodbye letter, always loved you, etc. You've probably read a lot of them people brought in."

"All right, I will fill it in. You used the word defense to Thornton a while ago, saying that his defense might not be so strong after all. Your mother must have brought him up in that letter and asked you to get in touch with him. She probably mentioned the letters, even offering that as the reason he missed things. I'm sure she did not tell you to read the whole batch of them." That idea had Gregory House written all over it in capitals. "But she must have asked you to let Thornton give his defense, probably in those words. If it was written back during the trial last summer, the legal parallel would have been right there on her mind. Am I close?"

House sighed and finally, to Jensen's relief, sat down on the edge of the bed, though with a good space between them. "She made that her last wish. How are you going to compete as a mere shrink with a mother's last wish? Mom is telling me to do this."

"But she did not tell you to read them. She wanted you to talk to him. Actually, she probably wanted you to listen to him."

"In a court, the evidence matters more than the witnesses. The witnesses can lie."

"You think that evidence can't lie? In fact, I'm sure what she was trying to tell you was that all those letters did lie. Unintentionally, but it was a lie. But human testimony has tremendous value in court, even today. We interpret things as people, not just hard data. That's why you are such a good doctor, in fact. If it weren't for the interpretation, the creativity, the way you interact with the cases, if it were only hard, cold figures in a lab, then anybody else could do it, too. Or a computer could. If you replaced yourself at the hospital with a computer, even a highly advanced one programmed to the teeth with medical knowledge, do you really think the success rate would stay the same? You even cross-examine patients and families yourself on the tougher cases. Reading their reactions is often the key that gives you a break on the case. Yes, they can lie, but interpreting them still has a lot of value and can tell you a lot more than just a lab printout. When the chips are down, you go talk to the people."

House still looked stubborn. Jensen continued after a moment. "Back in September when you first found out about these letters, you decided that asking for all of them would be too much for you. Remember reading just one of them, the impact of that? You made the right decision there. But tell me, why is this a good idea now, under more stress already from a family death, when it was a bad idea in September with no personal crisis going on?"

"He's getting too close. To the girls, and to Lisa." And to you, Jensen added silently. "I need to know now what those letters said."

"But didn't your mother tell you what they said in her final letter?"

"That was just a summary."

"Has he ever tried to tell you what they said? Given you a summary? Made his defense, as she put it?"

That caught House's attention, the emotional whirlwind retreating a little as he seized the puzzle. "No. He told me how many there were, but that was a direct question from me."

"In fact, he didn't offer to send them then, did he?"

"No. Just answered my question and then dropped it."

"Why didn't he want to send them, Dr. House? Two possible reasons."

"They gave a lot more clues than she thinks, and any moron should have seen it."

"That's one of the possible reasons. And the other one is?" House sat mute, determined not to give it, even though they were on the same page. "He was concerned about your reaction. He thought dumping that much of the past on you would be too much at once. Even if it exonerated him, he was more concerned with you than with making his defense."

"He did send the one, though."

"Think back to that week. Your communication to date with him had been just brief challenges you sent by email. He really hadn't talked much with you. But that Tuesday, you got the CD and picture and emailed him that they arrived, and he sent back a long message with details about the music. He also mailed the letter that day as proof of the music. Tuesday night, you had a nightmare filling in your half of the scene. The next morning, you sent him a note telling him he had given you a nightmare by his reply to your email. He had to be worrying that whole next day about that letter in the mail, hoping it wouldn't do the same, wishing he could call it back. That had to be why he has never again sent you another one, even singly. You said yourself that that letter must have been one of the best of them, being just about the piano. He's been concerned about you. Not just about himself - if he were only concerned about himself, about making his point, you would already have his defense, as your mother called it. You would have had it by express mail, the whole lot of them, sent the minute he got back home after the trial."

"Unless they really do say more than that, and he should have known," House insisted.

"If they are a bad defense, as you put it, he would have put up far more argument than he just did about going to get them. He would do anything to keep you from seeing them if they convict him. He could have stood on their status as private letters, not even ones to you. Pointed out how hard it would be to get a plane ticket last minute. He also could have lied, said a pipe burst and they were ruined in the water or something. But there would have been far more of a production before just yielding and turning to go. If he's just concerned about you, on the other hand, his reaction now makes perfect sense. He still thinks they are too much at once, but he knows that to turn down that direct request from you would burn the bridges and make you even madder. Stalling about it would do the same thing. You had him trapped, precisely because he loves you, and that is his only motive in all this." And no doubt, Thornton was hoping they would talk to his son in the meantime. Jensen remembered that look of desperation as he had left.

House, predictably, jumped tracks, as he often did when something was getting too emotionally close. "You said there were other ways to do the same thing."

"Yes. What you are after is data. But hitting all of it at once is worse than useless, Dr. House. It's damaging. Take a computer, for instance. If it only has so much memory and processing capability, and you try to download a file a hundred times that, it fails. You don't even get the use of part of your file up until the limit was reached. Or, like I said a year ago, think of it like allergy shots. If Cathy got one of her allergy shots every minute throughout the day, just to get her past her reaction once and for all rather than dragging things out, we'd send her into a medical crisis."

"We can't do reconditioning here," House protested. "I need to read those letters."

"There are three basic approaches to getting that data besides reading the whole batch right now. First is doing them one at a time. Think back to reading that one, how that affected you. Even going one at a time would be plenty. But if you want, we can work through this together in sessions to process what they contain."

House shook his head. "Like I said, he's getting too close. I'm running out of time. What are the other ways?"

"Second, talk to him, like your mother probably suggested. Ask him what's in the letters. Hear his defense straight from him."

"Hell, no. Forget that one."

"Okay, the third way. If it's data you want, immediate data, then look at the information besides the letters. There is plenty there already. Why did Thornton arrange your mother's funeral, for instance? Why has he played along with your limits on the girls?"

"He's pushing that," House growled.

"No, they are pushing that. They are interested and getting closer. He's letting them take the lead. But again, if all he wanted was some cure for loneliness, instant grandkids, if he really was worried about the content of those letters from his point of view, that they might not be a good defense, he would have been pushing it with the girls far more for the last several months. He'd want to get in as fast as he could, so that when the house of cards fell and his weak defense was exposed, he would already be so close to them that you would have trouble kicking him out. He would have, for one thing, called your mother to interrogate her. Do you realize how easily he could have gotten information that way?"

"I told her not to talk to him," House reminded him.

"Even so, I think he still could have gotten it out of her. But the fact remains, he did not try, Dr. House. She was by far the weakest link in the information chain. He was a professional at finding those. He has respected your limits every step of the way since last summer, starting from when you asked him to go sit in the other room in court. If all he wanted was a cure for loneliness, he's taking an awfully slow route there when we know how much more he's capable of. That is data, Dr. House. Even a trial rarely has just one exhibit of evidence. You're looking at the letters like they are all there is, but you have so much more to work with. Behavior is itself evidence."

House was hitting the limit, Jensen could tell, physically and mentally. "Think about it, Dr. House. He can't possibly be back until tomorrow morning with the letters. Think about this tonight."

House shook his head. "I need to read those letters," he insisted, the stubbornness increasing with exhaustion. "I've got to decide soon about him, like I said."

Jensen took his second to last argument for the moment. He wasn't expecting this next point to have any positive result at the moment, just hoped House would think it over in between now and opening the file of letters. "Two more things, Dr. House, and then I'm done for now." House looked skeptical. "Really. Two more points, and that's it. First, data is never going to be enough here. There will never be a time where data alone balances out what John did on the scales, and you can decide it's equal now. In the end, you will never be able to make this decision about Thornton on data, no matter how much you have. You're going to have to make it on trust."

As he'd expected, House didn't like that point at all. Jensen left it, hoping it was fertilized and would grow quickly, and went on. "However, second point. If what you are after is data, as much as you can get, you're ignoring a huge amount here. And I'm not talking about Thornton's behavior now; there is other data that you simply refuse to see. With a patient, if you start ignoring certain symptoms instead of looking at all of them, it can lead you astray."

House practically snarled at him. "What the hell are you talking about?"

"Dr. Cuddy and the girls." House hit his feet. Fortunately, it took him a while, and Jensen landed the remaining few sentences before he could escape. "Watch them, Dr. House. Watch them tonight; again, you won't delay the letters at all by doing this. Try to convince them things are fine with you. Then take what you see tonight and multiply it 128 times. That is what you, and your wife, and your girls are heading for on this course."

House, having achieved his feet, glared at the psychiatrist. "I need to know," he repeated, "and you aren't going to stop me."

"I know that. Just watch them tonight. See the data." Jensen stood up himself. "That's all I'm going to say on it unless you want more."

"Fat chance of that happening." House looked at him, suddenly suspicious. "I'll bet you can't help another lecture squeezed in somewhere before he gets back."

"What would you bet?" Jensen replied pleasantly. "I mean it. This was our only session on this until you decide what to do with the letters. You can make up your own mind, and you will anyway. But if you want to talk more about it, I'm here."

Jensen left his patient standing there, stepped past him, and opened the bedroom door. Cuddy was right at the end of the hall, looking so wound up she was about to break, and Wilson, hovering behind her, didn't look any more relaxed. "Later," Jensen mouthed silently as House started to limp out stiffly behind him, and Cuddy reluctantly nodded once. Dumping a wifely session on him right now without at least something of a break would be overload itself, although nowhere close to the impact of 128 letters.

Instead of speaking, Cuddy just came forward, embracing her husband tightly, and Jensen touched Wilson on the arm and moved away. The oncologist slowly followed him, giving the other two some space. "Did he change his mind?" Wilson whispered urgently.

Jensen only gave him that annoying confidential reminder look and picked up a picture at random out of a box, studying it, then putting it down as House and Cuddy exited the hall. "Let's go check on the girls," Jensen suggested. "Do you want me to go get them?"

House ignored him and limped resolutely into the kitchen, keeping his eyes firmly averted from the table, heading straight for the sliding glass door into the back yard. Cuddy collected coats and followed him quickly. Rachel was walking quiet circles instead of her usual run, and Marina, sitting in a patio chair, was holding Abby; both girls looked up as soon as their father came out. "Daddy!" Rachel charged over, and Abby nearly fell off Marina's lap, trying to get down even faster than the nanny was putting her down. As soon as she could, she bolted to him, too. House bent over to them.

"It's okay, girls. Everything's fine." Four little eyes were fixed on him, and he tried as hard as he could to convince himself they looked reassured. "Let's go back in, okay? Time to eat before long. What about another pizza?"

Slowly, the family went back inside.