Warning: Major Character deaths.
A/N: I came across the little story "Endings" by orphan_account on Archive of Our Own and I wanted to explain why Nell was found by her adopted daughter with a smile on her face. The story is briefly edited here to clarify a couple of points for those who didn't read the original two stories. (Inspired by "Endings" by orphan_account.)
Disclaimer: I own none of the characters or places in this story. I don't even own a package of Oreos. I feed all my characters on my imagination.
The smile on Nell's face came from the realization that things were finally all over for her. For so many years she had tried to hold things together for everyone, first in reality (if what they did could ever be called real, with all the cover stories and outright lies they needed to do their jobs and survive) and finally in memory of who and what they once were, there in the one place where all the stories and lies ended.
She had tried to reach out to Callen after Sam died from a lucky bullet on an op, using every bit of her supposed superior intellect to get him to see that, logically he was not responsible. When that proved to be an utter failure, she tried to offer him the comfort of her body to see him through the crisis. But no matter what she tried, she could not reach his tortured soul.
Nell saw how much the self doubt and emotional distancing of Hetty's Special Agent in Charge was taking its toll on the older woman. The Operations Manager confided in the red haired pixy that she was grooming her to be the next head of the OSP. Nell tried to relieve Hetty of as much of the daily burdens as she could, but she failed at that too. The "duchess of deception" could fool everyone else, but Nell knew otherwise. She saw the life force being drained from the little woman, a little bit more every day. Nell was not surprised when Hetty just disappeared. She knew that it was someone from one of the other federal three lettered agencies that did it; she just couldn't prove which one - another one of her failures. Hetty had known too many secrets and everyone feared her mind would deteriorate to the point where those secrets would start to come out. The massive file that appeared on Nell's desk opened her eyes to just a small amount of those facts that had been hidden in Hetty's mind.
Nell was so caught up trying to fill Hetty's shoes that she lost track of Nate. When she tried to reconnect with the CIA agent, she just got the runaround from his superiors. She had to threaten to use several of Hetty's secrets just to find out he was dead. She used up even more to learn the circumstances of his death. Her greatest failure with Nate was following orders to use her team to investigate some rinky-dink case instead of sending them to recover his body.
As the temporary OSP manager Nell tried to keep Callen from being borrowed by the CIA. But he was too good an agent and she was too new a Ops manager to succeed. She tried to fight - for him, with him - to keep him from being destroyed. But he continued to go out and heedlessly throw himself in the face of danger, because he no longer cared if he lived or died. And in the end, she failed him too.
Nell was certain it was her failure that Kensi and Deeks lost their lives. She knew she didn't have to send them out to help the LAPD that day; instead she should have sent them home to take care of the twins. She knew that they were not bomb disposal experts. She knew that they would not leave once they got the others out. She knew that the timer was rapidly counting down to zero. She knew they would never make it out as she screamed at them to leave while the two of them struggled to defuse the bomb. Her heart exploded into a million pieces as she watched their lives wink out of existence when the picture on Eric's monitor turned black as the bomb exploded. When she tried to pick up those pieces and reassemble them, there were so many missing. There were just too many gaps, empty holes that could never be filled.
She and Eric had to be strong, since they had to raise the twins in their parents' absence. But after the pair started college, Eric slowly started to lose interest in everything. His last medical exam had been over three years before he went surfing that day. Nell had ordered him to go and get completely checked out. But both of them knew that, when it came to Eric, Nell's threats had no teeth to them. Eric persistently delayed any doctor's visit and the aneurysm took him while he was on the water. Another one of her failures.
Nell sat at her desk, finally finished with cleaning up every thing that needed to be taken care of. She found and finally signed the long overdue work order for the tombstone change. It had been mixed in among the other work orders that had all been denied. How long ago was it that she promised herself that she would do this for her friend? One more thing she failed to see through.
At last there was nothing left for her to do that was work related. So many failures lay in her past. There was just one last thing left that she needed to accomplish, and she would do it, even if it killed her. She didn't know if there would be any Oreos on the other side, and she was determined to take as many of them with her as she could. There was no failure this time as she ate each and every one in the package. Then she slowly laid her head on her desk, and smiled as she saw all the members of the team, celebrating her success, as they welcomed her home for the final time.