Thinking of Teucer's life as a child and adult.
He grows up in a family as both a member and outsider. His father, Telamon, raises him, shelters him, and lets him stand beside Ajax as if having a Trojan mother didn’t matter.
But that doesn’t stop the servants from whispering when they think no one is listening. How his mother, the war bride, brought foreign blood into the House of Telamon, himself being the poisoned dagger.
He's never outright rejected, but there’s always the awareness that his place there is conditional, not inherent, and that one wrong move could shift everything.
Ajax, however, is different. He doesn’t just accept Teucer. He includes him in everything.
As boys, it probably felt like being chosen again and again in a game where everyone else assumed Teucer shouldn’t even be there.
He doesn’t just become the rock that keeps Teucer steady; he becomes his shield.
And when they’re called to Troy, Teucer is returning to a home he never had.
The city only existed through Hesione’s stories. She told him about green fields, open skies, and beaches along the coast. It's something she lost long before he was born, but never fully gone in her voice.
To Teucer, Troy felt familiar despite never having seen it. A place he had imagined one day visiting. And now the first time he sees it is as part of the army sent to destroy it.
I imagine Hesione struggles to meet his eyes before he leaves. Not because she doesn’t love him, but because her son, the fruit of her suffering, will help burn the homeland she never got back.
Still, Ajax is there, and for a while, that’s enough.
They're an absolute unit when fighting. Ajax covers him as Teucer draws his bow, and lifts his shield as Teucer fires.
Two brothers moving as one, inseparable in the palace and battlefield.
And as the war drags on, I imagine Teucer watching every story his mother told him slowly fall apart.
The fields become razed, the beaches turn red, and the Troy he once imagined becomes a nightmare he wants to leave from.
Yet through all of it, Ajax remains.
Until he doesn’t.
And that’s what makes Ajax’s death so unbearable. He doesn’t fall in some final stand or heroic defense, but over Achilles’ armor, over pride, rage, and refusal.
And in losing him, Teucer loses the one person who never made him question whether he belonged.
He fights for Ajax’s burial and wins it, but there’s no real victory in that. Because when he returns home, the shield is gone.
Ajax was Telamon’s heir. The eldest son. The future of the house.
And only Teucer, the Trojan bastard, survived.
Conclusion to Telamon: the wrong son died.
Whether Telamon truly believed Teucer failed him or grief simply needed somewhere to land, the result is the same: Teucer is exiled.
And in the end, Teucer loses two homes.
The one he never lived in, and the one he belonged to.