"Similar? I fail to see how. Unlike him, I don't need to go chasing someone's ghost in order to validate my own existence." He doesn't exactly get it, but he's never really spent much time with the other, so it's a little hard to say for certain, and Treize isn't the same as an innocent child, so that can't be a similarity. At least, he doesn't view it that way.

But maybe the conversation should be steered elsewhere. Bring things back around to the here and now, because this is where they are, and this is what they have to deal with. And to prove Duo wrong about his inability to make friends -or at least tolerate people enough to be quasi-passable- he chooses one topic and runs with it. "I flooded the laundromat down the street not too long ago. There was a girl who helped me clean up the mess the first time, and then the guy who needs a kick in the teeth got me out of doing the rest of it." Just a plain, casual tone, as if he were talking about the weather.