Author's Note: For the Caesar's Palace Rainbow History Month Challenge.
Captain Gates hadn't always been a sir. Her childhood had, as her mother was keen on reminding her, plenty of pink and frills and baby dolls. But it also meant model building, tree climbing, and plenty of games of cops and robbers. Her mama didn't raise boys and girls, but, as she was keen to remind her mother, "good, fine young people with a mind to do whatever it is they wanted to do".
And Victoria Gates wanted to win both cops and robbers and king of the hill. While she had enjoyed police work from the bottom up, she wanted to be the boss's boss's boss for as far back as she could remember. The world was broken, and the world of policing splintering a little more every year. The higher up you went, the more power you had to fix it. Ambition, was the natural end result of being a good cop, end of.
Acting on ambition, that was harder. Her mama didn't raise fools either. The future police captain knew that there'd be plenty of people who objected to taking their orders from a woman of color, so she toned down the one aspect she had control of: pantsuits not dresses; sir, never maam or miss; and signing Vic Gates where Captain didn't suffice.
It wasn't her fault that masculinity served her purposes better, commanded her the respect she deserved. In truth, she admired the kind of women, like Detective Beckett, who were fully comfortable using their womanhood alongside their more standard disarming techniques. Vic Gates had simply grown tired of puppy dog men and their passing comments. If she ever needed to be reminded she made the right call, she had only to spend a few moments in the company of one Rick Castle. The man broke every rule in the book and then some, drooled over every pair of breasts that got close, and still came out ahead.
If she'd been born a decade or three later, she might've been into these new pronouns. As it was, she simply learned to take off her proverbial cap and badge when she got home. By day, she was Captain "Iron" Gates. No nonsense cop. Tonight, she'd run a bubble bath, catch up on Wives of Wall Street, put on her best perfume, and meet her husband for dancing. The world demanded she pick a side; they should have known she was far more stubborn than that.
