Hah. Now that was irony. Dirk knew full well that humans were fragile creatures, easy to kill; so few of them were left in his time. Yet when it was someone he knew and cared about...

Precisely. That's a nice, logical way to think about it.

And yet he remembered that when he'd had that memory, Dave hadn't really been all that okay with it. He'd actually been pretty distraught.

And hey, it's yet another uncanny similarity between our timelines.