A/N: This was originally written in August 2022 in response to the prompt 'Pragma' in the EO8GreekLoves collection on AO3, which emerged after David Graziano, the new SVU showrunner, posted about the different types of love that the Ancient Greeks recognized. The AO3 prompt read: "Pragma is practical love. Pragma is love based on duty, obligation, or logic." Pragma can also be described as longstanding, enduring, "mature" love, characterized by compromise, understanding, patience, and making an effort to give love instead of just receiving it.

Timeline: Contemporaneous with time of writing (between SVU s23 & s24 and OC s2 & s3), but not based on events from either show.

And here, the obligatory disclaimer: These characters are so not mine.

"Setting for Two"

It strikes her about three months after she gets her new car. There was nothing wrong with her other one, which she still has and which she has no plans to get rid of, and the wild impracticality of being a single woman with two vehicles—in Manhattan—is not lost on her. Nor is the fact that the new one is so sporty and peppy that it's hardly better on gas mileage—in this economy, in Manhattan. But she had wanted it, and she could afford it, and she was trying to let herself have the things she really wanted more and more these days.

But as fun as it is, it's a stark, sobering reminder of the fundamental difference between her and Elliot now. That she, a captain and responsible only for the survival of herself and one other little person in this world, can afford a such a wildly impractical thing. And that he, a detective, albeit first grade and with seniority, who spent much of his career as the primary provider for a family of seven and is still the sole provider for a teenager constantly on the verge of crisis and a doddering octogenarian, could never.

The first time she picked him up in it, she saw the way his eyes studied it, lingered on it, nearly ogled it—the slow, smoldering, covetous way his eyes raked over its curves, a heated gaze she'd felt herself too many times to count—before he finally clucked his tongue and told her, "Nice ride."

She had only smirked in response. He dropped into the front passenger seat beside her that day, taking in the cabin features approvingly, and she peeled out almost before he had his seatbelt on. He laughed at the unexpected and sudden acceleration, and she grinned back at him with abandon as her hair whipped into her face from her open window. Wild.

Two weeks later, Elliot's eyes still lit up with every downshift and tightly-taken corner. To be fair, she also still thrilled at driving it, but it was hers, and she could joyride whensoever she pleased. And, really, it was the unexpected, childlike glee from her old friend—the earnest working cop, the dutiful father, the decent man who seemed to know only sacrifice and loss—that made her the happiest in the end, made her take those turns just a little faster.

The fourth time she picked him up in it, she met him at his door and as they approached her car together on the street, she quietly offered him the key. "How about you drive?" she said.

His head whipped around instantly. "You're kidding."

She just raised her eyebrows and wordlessly pressed her keys into his palm before veering away toward the passenger side.

The reverence with which he ran his hands over the steering wheel that first time almost made her chest ache.

The third time she passed him the key, he asked if he could adjust the seat. She squinted back in confusion: Why wouldn't he adjust the seat? Then again, their boundaries are different now. Their relationship is different. She knows that. He defers to her professionally all the time now, while before there was a reliable push and pull between them. And this car, this car that she can afford in every last insignificant way and he could never, only highlights how much things have changed. But she wants him to feel comfortable here, to know that he has a place here, that she wants him here—in her car, in her life—so after her brief initial confusion, she nodded and assured him that he may.

It became an unspoken routine with them, one they fell into as easily as they had every other familiar pattern they followed together: He would never ask, but she would hand her key over, and they would trade sides like it was nothing. And he stopped voicing his surprise when it happened, and he never looked hurt when it didn't, and all the while, his eyes never lost their delighted glint whenever he slipped behind the wheel and shifted into gear.

She's had the car for about three months when someone other than her or Elliot drives it for the first time. Noah's out of town at a sleepaway dance camp, and Olivia has thrown herself into work the way she used to, burning the candle at both ends as her squad tries to put together a time-sensitive case against another serial abuser. She's on her third night in a row of not going home, and Carisi of all people raps lightly on her office door to tell her there's an update.

She looks up instantly, startled by even the faintest noise, but her eyes are bleary and unseeing. Six collective hours of sleep within seventy-two, especially in one's fifties, will do that to a person. "Yeah?" she asks anyway, her voice breathy to mask her exhaustion.

But Carisi doesn't answer, just twists his tongue into his cheek and looks back into the squadroom. Rollins meets his gaze from her desk, glances at Olivia through the open blinds of the captain's office, and looks back expectantly at Carisi. "Uhmm," the former cop starts, bracing one hand against the doorframe and shifting his weight, "how 'bout I drive you home, Cap?" She may not be his CO anymore, but she'll always be his captain.

"I'm fine, Sonny," she lies, and it's her use of his nickname that gives it away.

He's bolder as he strides into her office. "Respectfully, Liv, you're not. Come on, you're practically dead at your desk right now."

"Remind me why you're even here, Counselor?" she asks, irritated by his presence and hoping that a mildly aggressive tone will get him to back down.

He opens his mouth to answer but hesitates and she's sure she's won. "You called me?" he finally says. "For 'all hands on deck'? And since I'm not going to be trying this case anyway…"

That shuts her up and she flashes him an apologetic smile—except that she's too tired, really, to "flash" anything, so it's more of a sloppy, sleepy, flat grimace. "Message received. Thank you. I'm sorry. You're right; I should go home for a bit," she says, rubbing a hand down her face and pushing back from her desk.

Carisi takes a step forward. "Nah, let me drive you," he insists.

She sighs and cocks her head because this reminds her so much of the way it used to be with Elliot. Even with Nick. She misses that, that sense of partnership, that insistence from another person to take care of her, that sense of trusting someone else enough to let them do just that. She shakes him off, saying, "I'll be fine. I don't want to leave my car here overnight."

"Then we'll take yours," he suggests quickly. "I'll drop you off and Uber back or something."

Olivia glances out to the squadroom where a devoted and capable skeleton crew is working a new angle.

"They'll be fine here," Carisi assures her, as if he can read her thoughts. "Fin's got 'em. Get some rest, come back in the morning. You'll see."

Honestly, she's too tired to argue. Every objection she might try to make feels fuzzy, like she can't quite capture the thought to articulate it. Hell, she doesn't even catch the fact that Carisi doesn't have a car of his own and had actually been offering to drive her home in hers this entire time. And maybe there's never any arguing with a lawyer anyway. She closes the open folder on her desk and lifts both hands in surrender. "Fine," she says. Carisi's a good guy. He cares fiercely about people and he always means well. She can let him have this win.

Not unpredictably, Carisi is a careful driver, and Olivia dozes off on the relatively short ride home. When she awakes, Carisi has already parked on the street, and she is secretly grateful that he had offered and insisted and that she hadn't had to deal with any of that—or with her garage at this hour. She mumbles her thanks again and makes a mental note to more formally acknowledge his thoughtfulness in the morning. He orders a car for himself and hangs back on the sidewalk until she's safely in her building, and that's the end of it.

Even though she practically falls into her driver's seat the next morning, Olivia doesn't yet realize that anything is different. She has slept and showered and eaten, but it still takes a moment to remember the events of the night before, and even then she can't understand why the damn seat is so far away from the damn steering wheel. Irritated and embarrassed by the graceless way she had ended up inside the vehicle, she mashes the '1' button on her power seat control to return to her pre-programmed position, collects herself, and heads to the station.

It's three days later when their case is fully built and she's meeting up with Elliot again that she starts to put the pieces together. She hands her key over without a second thought as they walk in step towards her car, and he wordlessly makes a beeline for the driver's side. As she climbs in next to him, she observes him adjusting his seat like normal. She watches a little more closely, though, studying how he lowers the seat, reclines the back slightly, commands the whole apparatus back along its track to give himself more legroom than she needs. She regards him somewhat skeptically, wondering how she had never fallen into the driver's seat before the other day.

That evening when she gets back in the driver's side after dropping him off, she looks before she sits. The seat doesn't look much lower than usual, even though she had seen Elliot adjust it down and it should still be in its exit position, even farther away from the steering wheel than before. Dubiously, she presses the '1' button before she even sits, but the seat doesn't move. She stares at it for a moment then gets in. The seat position is absolutely normal. She surveys her surroundings briefly before starting up and heading out.

The next time Elliot drives her car, she watches him with interest as he adjusts the seat again. It's like he has it down to a science, how long to hold each control in place to position himself just right. But she pays closer attention when he's about to get out—dawdles, a little, in fact, just so she can watch him. As soon as he shifts into park, he casually presses the '1' button himself and rides the seat to its programmed position. The seat then returns to Olivia's exit position when he kills the engine, and Elliot climbs out of the car utterly without ceremony.

In the 2.8 seconds that she watches him, everything suddenly becomes clear. Dominick Carisi, one of the most considerate and loyal people she knows, and the kind of guy who would fall all over himself trying to be polite to the women in his life, didn't bat an eye at adjusting her driver's seat the night he drove her home, and it apparently never occurred to him to return it to the position in which he had found it. And Elliot Stabler, who has been driving her new car almost as often as she has been for the last three months, and is basically the same height as the other man, has never once failed to restore the seat position for her, even though she's never said a word to him about it.

That's Elliot in a nutshell, she thinks. His concern for others is often silent but never absent. His deference to her is unwavering.

And maybe it's because he was still trying to atone for having disappeared for ten whole years, and maybe it's because their dynamic is different now and he feels like he has to be careful around her. Or maybe it's what he always would have done—because he has never not looked at her the way he does now, even when their relationship was different. But whatever the reason for his actions, she feels their implication in her very bones.

And she feels the same way. A ten-year disappearance had complicated the emotions but hadn't erased them. She's not sure anything ever could.

So the next time he's behind the wheel, after he's adjusted his seat but before he's shifted into gear, she puts a hand on his shoulder. It draws his attention instantly. "You good?" she asks.

He glances down at her hand then back at her. "Yeah?" he says, clearly wondering if she is.

And then she leans forward, stretching across him and into his space, perhaps intentionally a little closer than necessary, reveling in his scent as she lingers there above his lap. She doesn't say a word, but she reaches for the door panel, presses 'Set' and then '2,' and then withdraws.

Elliot follows her with his eyes, but she doesn't look at him. She catches his little half smile out of the corner of her eye as he starts up the car, but neither speaks.

The air shifts. Their boundaries are different now. Their relationship is different. It's complicated and difficult to put into words, but this car, this wildly impractical car of hers that she can afford and he cannot, which she willingly shares with him and he unflinchingly respects, which she loves and he loves, serves as a reflection of it.

She's making use of the armrest on the center console as Elliot drives them back into Manhattan for dinner, and after a moment he reaches over and lightly grasps her available hand. It's the boldest he's been with her in a long time. She smiles and squeezes his hand slightly. He squeezes back but doesn't let go. Wild.

-fin-

A/N: Thanks for reading! Would love to hear your thoughts, especially if you're strictly on FF and not AO3!