Disclaimer: Doctor Who belongs to the BBC. I do not own any of it, nor do I get paid for it.

A/N Sorry for my absence. I have been a bit ill and feeling a bit blocked with my writing at the same time. Plus, I was still contemplating changing the rating of this story. As you can see, the story is now rated M. But the explicit smut will be as a different chapter instead of in here in case the website throws a fit and people get offended or something.

In other news, the story crossed 600 reviews! Thank you so very much for that!

Here is Part 3 and the Doctor is still in three different pieces. That sounds weird but you know what I mean. Anything you recognise is from the audio.

There is a scene containing depiction of torture by electrocution towards the end, so feel free to skip the part but it's nothing too explicit or gory. I've changed the rating to M either way.

Happy Reading!

Ghosts of Oldbank: The Phantasm

Previously

"Where do you think it leads?" he asked. The other Doctor, the one who seemed perpetually angry for some reason, had told them to be on the lookout for anything that didn't fit. Fitz was sure that a small pool of water with water as clear as this in the midst of dead vegetation, certainly qualified as being out of place.

"Only one way to find out," said the Doctor with an excited grin. Before Fitz could stop him, he dived head first into the pool.

"Doctor," hissed Fitz as the Doctor all but disappeared. He briefly considered going after him before common sense kicked in. For all he knew, it was a trap and it would make no sense for him to get caught along with the Doctor.

No, he decided as he stood up and started jogging back towards the castle. It would be better if he went to Rose or one of the other Doctors for help.

Meanwhile, the Doctor who had fallen through the rabbit hole, was having the time of his life sliding down a ramp that took him right into the dungeons. Despite having fallen into a pool of water, he was completely dry, which he realised as soon as he reached the bottom. He jumped to his feet and glanced back the way he had come from with obvious delight.

"False water pool that is actually a secret entrance into the dungeon, I love it!" he declared to himself. "Now, let's see which way there is to go." The chamber he had landed in had paved stone walls and floors and was bare of anything else except the door. He went towards it and swung it open, gaping in astonishment when he realised that it was just one door in a maze of other doors.

With a grin of anticipation, he started to explore the chambers behind each door one at a time.

"You can't do this to me. You can't just...pushing me away one minute and...and then lookin' at me an-and kissin' me like that. It's not fair."

"Rose," he said again as he stood up.

Rose moved back until she was nearly backed against the wall. "The whole of last week, and now, this. I don't even know what's going on wi-AAARRRGGHHH…."

The wall behind her slid open and Rose lost her balance as she fell backwards. She heard the Doctor call for her in alarm, but Rose felt herself sliding down a chute through the darkness. Before she could try and find something to stop her descent, she landed on the cold stone floor with a thump.

Groaning in pain and more than a bit of embarrassment, she dragged herself to her feet and looked around. It was pitch dark and extremely cold, and the dank smell just confirmed the fact that she had most likely landed into the castle's dungeon. It was disconcerting how quickly she could identify a dungeon even without her sight, but having been locked up in so many of them during the course of her travels with the Doctor had done wonders for her deductive skills.

Fumbling around in her leather jacket, she found the small silver torch that the Doctor had given her and shone it around. As expected, it was definitely the dungeon and quite a bare one at that. Considering the size of the castle, Rose was willing to bet that there would be more chambers than just this one. She was about to go to the door and see for herself when she heard footsteps.

Quickly, she turned off the torch and backed into the shadows, determined to stay hidden. The footsteps stopped at the door and the person behind it, started to turn the knob. Rose gripped the torch in her hand tightly, determined to use it as a weapon if needed.

However, when the doors opened, the silhouette belonged to a familiar figure. Before Rose could call out his name, he shone the torch right in her face, causing her to turn away.

"Rose!" he said, surprise evident in his voice. "What are you doing here?"

"Fell through the wall," she said, blinking to clear her vision. "What about you?" she asked him, still unsure if he was the normal Doctor or the eccentric one.

"I fell down a rabbit hole," he said, sounding quite excited and Rose didn't have to guess anymore which one he was since his tone made it quite clear. "Well, it was more like a shallow body of water disguised as an entrance into the dungeon, but semantics!"

Rose smiled, despite herself. "You jumped into it, didn't you?"

"I had to, Rose," he said, as if the very idea of not doing it would be sacrilegious. "How else would I be able to tell where it came out?"

"You could have scanned it with your sonic screwdriver," she pointed out, still highly amused. Without the rational side present, it appeared that the Doctor's natural curiosity overshadowed even his basic cautiousness.

He made a face at her suggestion as if the very idea of doing that was somehow absurd. "Where is the me that was with you?" he asked curiously.

Rose looked away. "Probably looking for me," she mumbled.

The Doctor was silent for a moment before he nodded. "Let us find our way back to him," he said, sounding almost like his normal self. "Knowing him, he'll be ready to tear things apart by now."

It wasn't too far off from what the Sulky Doctor was doing at that very moment. He had tried to find a lever or some sort of an opening but the thing refused to open. Fitz found him a few minutes later, cursing up a storm in every language he knew how.

"Doctor?" Fitz's voice was almost meek in the face of the Doctor's anger.

"What?" he growled, looking thunderous. He looked taken aback at Fitz's appearance before schooling his expression into the ever present scowl from before. "What happened?" he demanded.

"You, he, jumped into this pool of water and just disappeared," said Fitz carefully. He very deliberately didn't ask about Rose since this Doctor still looked quite furious. As little as Fitz knew about his new friends, he knew how protective the Doctor was when it came to Rose.

"Rose disappeared through this wall," said the Doctor, pointing to it. "Help me find an opening."

Fitz nodded and the two of them started to tap the different parts of the wall to find some way of opening the secret trapdoor in the wall. Finally, Fitz discovered that the lever was not on the wall at all, but on the floor of the hallway. The opening slid open and the Doctor clenched his jaw as he walked towards it with determined steps.

Fitz ran after him and the two of them slid down the same chute that Rose had fallen into before.

"You're very quiet," commented the Doctor, as they searched for a way out of the dungeons.

Rose glanced at him in surprise. He was still getting distracted by the little things but the majority of his time was spent looking at her through the corner of his eyes. Not for the first time Rose wondered if the split in personalities had been as clear cut as she'd initially assumed. "I'm fine, I guess," she said.

"You know, you shouldn't take what he said to heart," he said in a gentle tone.

"It wasn't anything he said," she half-lied, since him saying that he couldn't stand her still stung a bit.

The Doctor glanced sideways at her. "I may be out of my mind but I know what I'm out of my mind about," he said. "We don't like him either, and he is a part of me that the other two of us prefer to be kept silent. Unfortunately, there are times when he escapes the chains that we put him in."

"He's not all bad," Rose said before she could stop herself.

The Doctor looked surprised at her defending him. "Out of the three of us, who would you say is the oldest and who would be the youngest?" he asked.

Rose looked taken aback at the odd change in topic but went ahead and answered. "You would be the youngest, and the one that I was with was probably the oldest, yeah?"

He smiled widely. "Wrong," he said. "I'm the oldest. I was the first one. The childishness, the curiosity, the desire to see the universe, the thirst for discovering new things. Then came the rational one. He curbed some of my enthusiasm, put restrictions on my recklessness and made me grow up a bit. Then, he came. The Storm, we call him. All the darkness, all the pain, all the nasty things he's done, all the guilt he richly deserves; that's all on him."

Rose's eyes were wide with horror. "But...he…" she snapped her mouth shut, remembering the terror in his eyes when she had lost her footing. The anger, Rose realised, was directed at himself. Because he was carrying the guilt and pain heaped onto him by his other selves. Rose wanted to get back to him at once and apologise for pushing him away. He'd reached out to her and she had rejected him, just as the other two had.

"Rose, Rose, where are you going?" asked the Doctor as she broke out into a sprint.

She didn't stop to answer; she had to find the Storm at once.

It was a typical dungeon, with stone prison cells, rusty chains on the wall and corridors upon corridors of a twisted labyrinth. With a sigh, he contemplated using a string or something equally useful for navigating the corridors when he felt a sharp blow at the back of his head.

His vision went black but before he lost consciousness, he could have sworn he saw a pair of red eyes.

When he came to, he realised that he was flat on his back on a cold, hard surface and was naked from the waist up. There were straps across his torso and legs pinning him down tightly to the examination table, and his wrists and ankles were in metal cuffs attached to it.

He glanced around quickly and saw that the table next to him held a variety of instruments, and his eyes went wide when he discovered that some of them were used across the universe as tools of torture.

"You're awake," a gravelly voice said and the Doctor snapped towards it. His eyes went wide when he recognised the red eyes he had seen just before he'd lost consciousness. They belonged to a hunched over bald, old man with oddly grey skin that made him look like a ghost. The unwashed white lab coat only added to his ghostly appearance.

"The Phantasm, I presume," said the Doctor.

"Yes," he answered, unsurprised. "I have waited long for someone like you to venture into my laboratory." He spoke in a monotonous voice that had no inflection whatsoever, making him sound even more sinister.

"Someone like me?" asked the Doctor.

"Multifaceted," said the Phantasm. "Complex personalities are an old curiosity of mine. Many years ago, I was as human as any other being on this planet. But I wished to be more, I wanted more than a simple human body. I tried a lot of things to change the fact…"

"On yourself, I'm guessing," said the Doctor, with a look at the odd pallor of his skin and the way his limbs and torso appeared to have been stretched and reassembled.

"Worthy test subjects are difficult to acquire," he said in the same monotonous voice.

"Am to understand that I qualify as one then?" inquired the Doctor lightly.

"You do," the Phantasm said shortly. "You will answer my questions," he ordered. "If you refuse," he walked around to the table with the instruments and picked up a pair of electrodes. "You will suffer."

"Rose, stop!"

His own voice echoed around him but there was no sign of Rose. He broke out into a run down one of the hallways, unaware that he had taken a wrong turn and was heading in a direction completely opposite to Rose's.

Rose, meanwhile, had ground to a stop when she'd realised that the chamber she was in was the innermost chamber of the castle. Unlike the rest of the place, this looked like someone was still living there. There were rows and rows of books and instruments, a desk full of papers and files, even a computer.

Curiously, Rose ventured to one of the instruments and saw that it was an MRI machine, but somehow smaller and more sleek than ones she remembered from back home. The one next to it appeared to be a more advanced form of a scanner, and as Rose passed it, a small beacon lit up on it without her noticing.

She went towards the desk and started shuffling through the papers. With a gasp of horror, she realised that they were sketches of various people being tortured. Whoever had sketched them had also written down the exact nature of the torture and their reactions to it. Feeling sick to her stomach, Rose dropped the papers.

She had to find the Doctor, and at this point it didn't matter which. They had to get the hell out of this place.

"I ask again, what species are you?" asked the Phantasm, flicking the switch to 'on' again.

The Doctor screamed again, the sweat from his body allowing the electricity to conduct even faster, making the agony worse. Still, he refused to answer the Phantasm.

Seeing his subject's non response, the Phantasm raised the charge even more, letting the electrodes taped to the Doctor's torso send powerful electric currents into his body. The scream that erupted from the Doctor's throat was raw and agonising. It echoed off the walls but no one was close enough to hear it.

"I can be very patient," said the Phantasm, allowing the Doctor to catch his breath and switching the defibrillator off. The Doctor gritted his teeth but a groan of pain still slipped past his lips.

"No," said the Doctor, the only word he'd spoken since the Phantasm had started his torture.

The Phantasm's hand was about to reach the switch again when he stopped and turned away. The Doctor looked surprised, and glanced towards him. He was examining a small remote control on the table.

"Ah," he said, and the Doctor felt his hearts chill at the slight triumph in his otherwise monotonous voice. "One of my instruments just registered a presence in my office. A female, I do believe."

The Doctor's hearts almost stopped, before he started to struggle. "Stay away from her," he shouted, his voice hoarse with pain.

"My scanner recorded her because like you, she does not register as fully human," said the Phantasm, giving no indication of having heard him. "Perhaps, she will be easier to break than you."

"NO! Don't go near her," said the Doctor, but the Phantasm made a shushing noise and injected a serum into the Doctor's arm. The Doctor tried to fight the effects of the sedative but in his weakened state, he couldn't focus and he succumbed to the darkness.

The Eccentric Doctor found himself at a dead end and realised that he'd lost Rose somewhere in the maze of hallways. With a groan, he started to retrace his steps, only to come face to face with a grey skinned old man with red eyes.

"Ah yes, another half," he hissed. "You'll be useful."

Before the Doctor could react, he'd fired off a bolt from the blowdart. It hit the Doctor's chest, and he collapsed immediately as the sedative simultaneously paralysed him and made him lose consciousness. The Phantasm picked his body up with a strength that defied his frail appearance, and took him into one of the torture rooms far away from the first Doctor he'd captured.

After making sure that he was tied up and secured, he went in search of the girl. The secret of a complex and diverse physiognomy would be his, no matter the cost.

A/N End of Part 3. Thanks for reading.

Hope the torture scenes weren't too explicit. My first choice for it was much worse. Ever heard of Death by a Thousand Cuts? Don't look it up if you're queasy about blood and gore.

Anyway, the final chapter will be up soon. Let me know what you thought of this one. See you soon!

~ Phoenix