If I have understood it correctly we have three expando stores on an element.
The first one is the "data" store. this is when you use

     el.data("mykey", "myvalue")

we then have an expando store "events" which stores all the event handlers that have been added using .on()

and lastly a "handle" store which I am not completly shure what it does.

what we are trying to mimmic is the jQuery version which clones both the data object and the events object.

since we have a method for interacting with the "data" expandostore i'm using that to retrieve.
but the events expandostore doesn, so there we use the expandostore directly.