For the prompt: Five pieces of advice that Lwaxana Troi knows her daughter won't want to hear, but she says them anyway

A life without regret is never…well, you understand.

Deanna was almost too easy to raise. Having been a teenager herself, Lwaxana had expected her daughter to be someone much more like herself. She'd been off with boys and girls, exploring, fantasying and experiencing everything but her studies, while Deanna seemed to do the opposite. Deanna studied, studied harder, and then studied psychology of all things. Perhaps she wanted to understand more of the minds of others than her abilities allowed.

Not that Lwaxana thought Deanna would have been any less serious if she'd been full Betazoid. She'd been born on a serious planet, or was it a dolorous star? She had read the classics, but Betazoid classics were dull, Terran classics were bloody, Klingon were worse, and the Vulcans never bothered to get hot and bothered. She'd never be able to quote the literature but she didn't need literature to know her daughter lived too carefully.

Which was why she had to hate the too bright, stiff and newly pressed young Lieutenant Striker.

She'd tried to tell Deanna, again and again that life was short, that she had to seize what she had. Life without regret is never something anyone looks back on.

Deanna rolled her eyes and shut her mind: so much like her father.

Lwaxana had regrets until she had to burn them away because to live without Ian, without Kestra, she could regret nothing. She could never be anything less because less was too silent, too still: she had to be more. If that meant observing obscure traditions, embarrassing her only daughter and gliding from one marriage to the next, she would do it. Maybe someday, Deanna would too.

First, she'd go tell Deanna how foolish men were, and how much she should avoid that Striker…or Riker, whatever his name was. If Deanna wouldn't take a hint, she could at least be counted on to be contrary.

Occasionally, You will be late, make others forget it as soon as you arrive.

"You could not be late and avoid the whole mess."

Lwaxana eyed her daughter over the triple-layered chocolate fudge cake, a confection so dense it seemed to want to suck in her fork like a quantum singularity. She was content to eat the cake with her hands, if it came to that. Deanna did have a knack for finding the most exquisite desert recipes.

"You can't think there's never a good reason to be late?" Lwaxana sent. Conversing telepathically allowed her to keep eating, which was a gift from the four deities. Putting down her fork would have been entirely impractical.

"There are reasons, but it's more polite to be on time." Deanna sent back reluctantly. She would have preferred they spoke slowly, like a conversant species, with their forks down and their cake sitting uneaten.

Lwaxana's retort was too abstract to put into words, but making Deanna flush from the shared sensation was well worth the effort.

"Like that." Setting down her fork, Deanna shook her head, then looked up and finally laughed. "Definitely that."

If you go to bed angry, at least have sex.

"So did you?"

"Did we what, Mother?" Deanna had the unique skill of turning the loving title into a curse.

"Make up." Lwaxana replied lightly. Some of the best sex was to be had with the crackle of tension still in one's skin. If her daughter had missed out on the first make-up sex of her marriage, she- well she- was going to have to come up with something more than staring at her in shock.

"You didn't."

"Of course not." Deanna sighed, rubbing her fingers over the ache in her temples. "We went to bed. Will stared at the ceiling and I-"

"Stared at the wall." Lwaxana remembered that about her Little One. On the rare occasionally Deanna had gone to bed in a huff as a girl, she'd stared pointedly at the wall because she knew how blank it made her mind. If she thought nothing, her mother could pick up nothing and Lwaxana would know how angry she still was.

"Little-"

Deanna's hiss made her swallow the endearment.

"You like that kind of passion in him."

A minute shifting of Deanna's head was some kind of nod.

"He loves it in you." Lwaxana barely had to be a telepath to know that. Will's love of his imzadi was as rich as their wedding cake, and something that brought tears to her eyes when she touched it.

Reaching for her daughter's stiff shoulder, Lwaxana stroked it.

"Why deny yourselves? You can make love and still be angry in the morning."

"What's the point of making love if we're still angry?" Deanna retorted. "You just said that we should make up."

"You can use sex to make up. You can use sex to still be angry. You can have sex because you're both young, virile beings absolutely in love with each other. Someday…" she let that thought trail off into the ether. Sleeping alone was not something she considered much above something to be tolerated like a rock in one's shoe.

Deanna's gaze softened instantly. Lwaxana mentally berated herself for thinking so loudly, then wrapped her hands around her daughter's shoulders.

"It's a good anger, but love is better."

Deanna turned, looking up at her mother as she took her hands into her own. "Love is hard."

"And easy. When you allow it to be."

"I hate allowing."

"It's one of your more charming flaws, Little One."

Be in the moment, especially when it hurts.

With her throat closed and her face in her hands, Deanna only managed to send a faintly coherent thought. It rested on the surface of Lwaxana's mind like a vooluxis petal on the water's surface. Her own tears stung and the memories stirred by Deanna's thought churned like a summer storm.

Ian hadn't come home, which at the time she'd found funny in that macabre sort of way. No body meant no traditional funeral pyre, no vigil over the coals to make sure they kept burning; Betazed was such a wet planet. At the time she'd been glad. Deanna was too young to stand outside and watch the embers of her father's shell die away.

She'd tried to burn one of his uniforms, but snatched it back before the flames reached it. It was that rich red she loved and it smelt of him. Ian had burned in the blackness of space and the Ristroiko system was his family. She wasn't sure if she'd ever be able to travel there and see where he died, defending the helpless against ion storms or some other spatial anomaly. She knew, she just didn't like to let herself remember.

No words she had could calm Deanna's fears that Will would be as lost as her father had been. Lwaxana couldn't promise that Will wouldn't disappear into the yawning, reaching black void in the same way. Sometimes Starfleet was as hungry for the people she loved as the skarks in her childhood nightmares. She'd been travelling when news of Will's capture had reached her, and crossing the galaxy could be done with hands on the right strings. She couldn't bring him back, but she could be party to her daughter's suffering. In this moment, they had a grief in common.

Lwaxana clung to the kernel of hope that in the end, she'd be alone and Deanna would have her imzadi back. It only seemed fair that the universe who had taken her love would have the courtesy to leave Deanna hers.

Be patient, for time is.

With a the long plait of her white hair that had given up its last strands of grey a few years ago over her shoulder, Deanna settled down into her chair and lifted the next chapter of her mother's journals. She'd read them all before, the chaos leading up to her wedding with Deanna's father, the fit Ian's father threw about being naked, how much Deanna's accomplishments pleased her and how proud she always was of her Little One. Reading her mother's journal was a tradition that had no specific time to its repetition; when she needed her, in her way, Lwaxana was always there.

Lwaxana's journals were stored in the computer, files recorded in decades past but still full of enough life to leap from the PADD. Some passages made little sense to Deanna in the beginning but were now achingly familiar. Her own children were grown, her husband drifting with the stellar dust as he'd wished, and Deanna Troi, who'd once swore to burn the ostentatious Troi Mansion to the ground, was the sole occupant. She had a valet: a tall, quiet Andorian woman who was nearly as old as Deanna but made a lovely cup of hot chocolate, and a rich garden full of bright flowers and sweet scents. She'd had a dog, then two, then a cat, then a few more and now there was a menagerie of lazy creatures filling her empty rooms.

The Holy Rings of Betazed were still in her mother's former closet but Deanna had moved the Sacred Chalice of Riix down into the dining room because it was a pleasant centrepiece. She hadn't yet found a place for the rings that wasn't hanging them from the chandelier, which seemed like a better idea each time she found a cat nestled in with them. Her daughter thought she had too many pets to take care of, her eldest son thought they kept her company and her youngest thought she should try some more exotic, like dhaka snakes.

The cats and dogs gave her sounds and demanded walks and attention, something Deanna was pleased to provide. Dhaka snakes would have to wait for her to no longer be interested in the path down to the lake or the gardens on the way to the city. Perhaps her older grandchildren would find them amusing.

Today as the rain fell outside, she had a youthful chapter of her mother's journal and buried in the effusive prose were the hints of the woman Lwaxana would grow into. Wisdom had seeds; her mother's had taken hold early and sunk their roots deep. A particularly detailed passage about Lwaxana's impatience with a certain young Starfleet ensign who loved to sing and was Terran, making him absolutely forbidden and thus utterly fascinating, brought a warmth to Deanna's chest that reminded her of Will. Her thoughts wandered, drifting from Will as he'd left her content with their life, to Will when he'd found her: brilliant, brash and ready to be the youngest captain in Starfleet.

He never regretted missing that milestone. Husband of the Fifth House, father of its children, imzadi, daddy and grandfather were more than enough titles and awards. Will had grown patient, just as her mother had.

Deanna had avoided any kind of concession, working well past her hundredth year and still lecturing when asked. It was only recently that she'd read her mother's final journals and understood what she'd written. Patience could be ignored or neglected and wait at long last to be discovered.

Deanna found it in sunshine and mid-afternoon cups of hot chocolate. Perhaps that was where it had always been.