004. Museum
There exists inside his mind already a museum.
Not really a mausoleum, or a morgue, although Leonard McCoy supposes that's what it really should be, considerin' all that's in that particular wing of his head is a list of the dead he knew, and the memories and thoughts attached to them.
A cousin he'd been close to when they were kids who ended up joining with Starfleet while he himself was starting out in the medicine field; the same cousin who ended up dying when the ambassadorial mission he was on went sour. He'd really liked strawberries, Bones remembers, and their mothers had been close.
Two of his grandmothers' on his pops' side; the third is still alive even though she's the youngest - the oldest was taken by a long-thought-defeated strain of cancer in the winter after he and Joy'd got married, and the grandmam in the middle went in her sleep, who he'd just talked to about coming down to help with the chickens when he was on break the day before.
That museum grows when he reaches Starfleet - a friend from one of his first, basic classes who gets run down by a driver too hopped up on some off-planet drug that was never meant for human consumption in the first place - a teacher who suicides in the middle of his third year, and him and Jim go to their funereal, mournful and quiet and shocked, all of 'em, despite Leo knowin' damn well that sometimes there just ain't any signs before a suicide.
He hopes - once things settle down, once the Enterprise is truly on her way out into the unmapped wilds of their chunk of space - that he might be able to close up that museum.
Bones knows he won't be able to, it comes with the territory, but he can hope all the same, can't he?