One of the driving forces of my time-travel project is having characters from other shows meeting each other. Snakes, being a loner, fits into this pattern particularly well. It isn't only in the time-travel stories where he turns up in other fandoms' stories, however, but in stories of other series that take place in the 19th Century.
Originally I hadn't really wanted to explore much of the time when he was actually alive before Posey killed him, as I preferred developing his explorations of friendship in the present day. But some of my projects, such as the story The Night of the Double-Dealer, touched on the idea that even in the past, Snakes was never all bad. Sure, he tried to bury his goodness, but he still helped people he felt were deserving of it. His experiences perhaps only made him more able to discern between those who needed help and those who were cold and cruel, such as the soldier who had left him marred for life.
I started to develop an image of 19th Century Snakes as somewhat of an antihero. This is explored to great lengths in the Maverick story Send My Condolences to Good, in which Snakes comes across Bart Maverick and cousin Beau Maverick and takes them in during their time of distress. He begins to bond with Beau, knowing that white sheep of the family Beau is an outsider everywhere, including in his own family. Something about Beau resonates with Snakes and he tries to convince Beau to join his criminal operations.
I've always been slightly intrigued by the fact that Southerner Snakes apparently had no problems with colored man Brutus in the episode. Perhaps Snakes just didn't want to get on Brutus's bad side, but up to the point when Snakes' betrayal of Miss Posey was made clear, Snakes seemed to fit in with the gang very well and seemed perfectly alright being around Brutus. So I developed another idea that perhaps Snakes, like Miss Posey, was rather progressive for his time.
Within the Maverick story, I finally had the chance to explore that side of Snakes' character. He tells Beau of an incident in his childhood when he played with a free colored boy who was just passing through. Snakes thought nothing of it, but it was one of the things that made him an undesirable candidate for adoption. As a successful crime boss, Snakes decides to pretty much give the finger to the society that had rejected him time and time again. He does this by hiring other outcasts in society, including colored people, and allowing them to achieve high-ranking positions. He tells Beau that everyone is welcome to join him: both genders and all races. Beau is admittedly intrigued, and confesses to Bart that if Snakes' business were legitimate and not criminal, Beau would very likely join him. Despite fighting for the South, none of the Mavericks seem to be racist people, and Beau is especially the idealist, the dreamer, the lover of adventure and challenging what ought not to be.
Snakes has other brushes with the Mavericks, including several meetings with Bret. The driving force behind all of their encounters is that Snakes is a crime boss, yes, but still good somewhere inside, and somewhere along the line there is always the chance for it to come out.
Snakes, however, honestly believes that he is not good, that he buried his goodness and it laid down and died. It isn't until the present day that he finally begins to realize what Beau and Bret and others realized in the past: that he has always had a great deal of goodness within him and never stopped letting it out.
In the present day, Snakes is confused. He is finally free of the shackles of his criminal past, and of his crippling fear of the Posey gang and of dying. But he's just starting to discover friendship for the first time, as well to discover the goodness within himself that he kept denying was there. While he is slowly starting to be accepted by Coley, Ray, and Lafe, who show him kindness between The Deadly Codename and Airship, Snakes also begins to have some strange solo adventures when he befriends an emotionally shattered boy who blames himself for his friend's death and wants to find a way to change the past.
Always skeptical and cynical, Snakes is nevertheless a valuable friend and learns a lot from his experiences with that boy, who is Duke Devlin from the Japanese anime Yu-Gi-Oh! Duke's situation is depicted in a dark story I wrote called Lead Me Through the Fire. Snakes' adventures with Duke are documented in several short stories as well as a very long multi-chapter, Close Your Eyes, Clear Your Heart, when it seems that Duke has finally attained his objective of reversing time and restoring his friend. But when time seemingly begins to unravel, Snakes joins them both and Duke's girlfriend Serenity on a quest to solve the mystery once and for all. Despite not even remembering Duke because of the time reset, Snakes feels a connection anyway and sticks it out despite his threats to leave.
I had planned that Close Your Eyes, Clear Your Heart takes place between Deadly Codename and Airship, but I realize that it can't. Airship features the first meeting of Snakes and Edward Lawrence, his go-to pilot when he needs to go to Mt. San Antonio for trips to the past, while in Close Your Eyes, Clear Your Heart, Snakes and Edward already know each other.
I had pictured the Yu-Gi-Oh! story happening first because Snakes is very cynical and seems to be a loner, whereas after Airship, he has been fully accepted by Coley, Ray, and Lafe and is considered their friend. Also, Serenity mentions in Close Your Eyes that Snakes has people who care whether he lives or dies, but not necessarily friends other than Duke.
I think, however, I have a way around the seeming discrepancy. When time "reset", Snakes and Duke fell out of contact. Serenity wouldn't know about the events of Airship. And perhaps the reset left Snakes in a more cynical state. By the end of the story, however, he remembers everything and would be fully back to however he had been before the reset.
Maverick is at least not too much of a surprising place to find Snakes, considering the characters are all gamblers in the Old West. But Yu-Gi-Oh!, where characters battle for the future of the world via a card game that becomes real, is certainly not where one might expect to find a battered old gambler and criminal looking to start over and find peace. Still, I think I managed to make it work quite well and I'm very pleased with how I slipped Snakes into two such different series.
My work in the Maverick fandom has presented a new problem to me, however, which I knew would happen if I pursued the angle of Snakes and Beau Maverick coming to an understanding and even ending up as friends in some odd way. But I couldn't resist the pull of the ideas and now I have a discrepancy since Snakes was not supposed to have had any friends before coming to the present-day. At the moment, I'm rationalizing it by having him so shattered by Pinto's torture that he wondered if Beau really had been a friend or would still think of him kindly after three years have passed; after all, they only met occasionally. It's also possible that the time re-set in the Yu-Gi-Oh! branch of Snakes' story may have had something to do with things. I'm going to have to think long and hard about this one.
Snakes has also been mentioned in stories for other series, even when he isn't actually shown. The Christopher Cary character Roger Bard says in a Mannix story that he once ran across someone who looked a great deal like him, save for the scar on his face. And in one of my short stories about Ginger Townsend and Lou Trevino, characters from an episode of The Rockford Files, Lou's brother Mike briefly mentions finding a new friend to discuss My Little Pony with. Also, in my only completed Rockford multi-chapter, Coley and Ray and Jane make cameo appearances during chapter 4.
One fun thing about so many series taking place in Los Angeles is that they can casually cross over and characters can make cameo appearances in stories for other series. I'm tentatively planning a Mannix-based crossover that would include characters from several Los Angeles-set series. Snakes, or the Oak Bridge crew, could very easily appear.