rec: The Sleepwalker by Aralias

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(I swear the next rec is pretty gen, I'm sorry y'all, this is just the subset of fandom I know well enough to rec competently in.)

Story: The Sleepwalker
Author: Aralias
Rating: Adult
Word Count: 20082
Author's Summary: “One day the Doctor woke up. (Eight/Master - written for the Buffy 'Normal Again' prompt on Best_Enemies)”
Characters: Charley Pollard, C’Rizz, Grace Holloway, Romana II, The Doctor (8th), The Master (Roberts), LOTS of Eight companions, in passing
Pairings: Eight/Roberts!Master
Warnings: Explicit Sex, Swearing (I’d add major character death, self-harm due to the mechanism of a plot thing)
Recced because:

The Doctor keeps swapping between his life on the TARDIS and a mundane AU where he’s a physicist teaching at Berkley in 2001, married to Roberts!Master and surrounded by people he knows in canon, but with switched-around names. Is it a fluff piece about them being humans and married and the Master mostly not being a terrible person who’d kill people? Or is it really disturbing and sad, a set up predicated on psychological weaponry (the origins of the Daleks’ Nightmare Child project) from the start of the Time War? Perhaps that depends on how creeped out you are by the ‘which of these lives is real’ “Normal Again” dilemma.

( Why this fic is important. )