"Appallingly terrible at communication?" he tries.

"… Not responding to flirting is not necessarily being 'appallingly terrible at communication'."

"Mmmm, not indicating your feelings on the matter kinda is, and also, like, this is not exactly the first example since you started existing a couple of days ago of you being bad at communication, it's just another instance of it."

Pause. "I know I haven't been the best at communication since I started existing, yes."

"And your counterfactuals seem to indicate this might be a pattern," he jabs. "Which is to say that, as advertised, the Twin makes a copy with a difference, not just a completely different individual who happens to share a face with the original. Shocking, I know."

"Counterfactuals plural or just that one?"

"Just that one, I suppose."

Tyler shrugs. "I might be bad at communicating, then."

"Mmhm. Let's hope I can do something about that that's not just reminding you of the conversation we had because, a, I actually had this conversation with Theo, and bee, you seem thoroughly immune to my charms, to my chagrin."

"The conversation being that you want me – him – to tell you things?"

"Not exactly tell me things, more like, in general, talk to me, because as his boyfriend I'd like to understand what he's feeling even if I cannot do anything to help."

Nod. "I am pretty sure we're talking about the main things right now."

"Yeah, which is nice. And, for the future, when someone flirts with you and you notice and are not interested, it'd be nice to them to tell them so."

"… When you kissed him you acted like it was all a joke, so I was assuming the flirting prior to that was mostly as a game."

"Mmmmno, it wasn't, I'd kinda been assuming by the not-kiss that he wasn't interested, what with all the ignoring the flirting thing going on. It hadn't occurred to me that he could have failed to notice." He grins at Theo.

Theo grins back! … A little.

"I don't recall the specifics of how much you flirted with him before that but I think it might have been clear from how I acted that I wasn't interested? And if not I could just tell you."

"Yep, just telling me would've been preferable. Like I said, I'd assumed he wasn't interested—incorrectly—and kept at it just because it was funny and he hadn't expressed an active dispreference for it."

"Mmh."

"Anyway, Shadow."

"I feel like a lot of these things, I might be inaccurate and only say I would have recognized them in retrospect. But like, standing by the bakery door while looking for the Shadow and then loosing your grip on your torch? Not the best move."

"Well sure but I was thinking more about differences in actions instead of outcomes."

"And with a few of the actions I'm going 'in retrospect that was a horrible idea' but were I actually there at the time I don't know I would have noticed."

"I suppose," he shrugs. "So, how're we doing for mental cleanup?"

"I am realizing I'm probably not as different from Theo as I first thought. It seems like there are lots of differences but that's after knowing the inside of his head and not the outside of mine."