"Jack!" Gwen screamed and Rose could see Owen hold her back.
Rose even took a stumbling step towards Jack's still form herself, before she was able to stop her own forward momentum, and she slowly raised her furious eyes to the cold, dead stare of Lisa.
"I will kill you for that," Rose snarled, but the Cyber unit's only reaction was to turn its back on its most recent victim and focus on its next potential target. Rose or Tosh.
Rose heard the alien lockpick finish beeping and the bolts release, but she couldn't make herself move to help Tosh, anger and grief threatened to overrule her common sense, and she could feel a fine tremble starting in the muscles of her shoulders as her fingers shifted on her gun once more.
With a loud gasp, Jack's eyes snapped open, and Rose's jaw dropped as he dragged himself to his feet with a cocky, if pain-filled, grin.
"Is that all you got?"
As Lisa turned her attention back to her resurrected victim, Rose wasted no more time and spun on the spot, pushing Tosh through the gate she'd unlocked, and slamming the metal bars closed behind them, one more barrier between them and Lisa.
She could interrogate her best friend later.
"Next door, quickly," she told Tosh, and the woman pressed the device to the huge gate that protected Torchwood, and was currently keeping them trapped inside.
"I'm not so easily deleted," Jack snarked before his sentence was cut off with a scream again, and Rose flinched.
Was Lisa so weakened that her attack wasn't deadly? Hearing Jack's scream go silent for the second time, Rose somehow doubted it, so how had Jack died and come back? How many times could he die before he stayed that way? She didn't want to find out.
The beeps from the machine Tosh was working with seemed to count down the seconds that they had left to live as Lisa once more turned away from Jack. Rose could see Owen pulling Gwen out of the main hub and towards the morgue, but Lisa was ignoring them. Her attention focused, instead, on the biggest perceived threat.
The human that had threatened to damage her unit, and Rose swallowed back her regret at her emotionally charged words.
She began her steady march towards Rose and Tosh as the unlocker beeped its success and Rose turned her back on the Cyber unit to help Tosh push the door open just enough to slide through.
It took them both many precious seconds, and Rose realised that Owen had been right. If Tosh had been alone, she wasn't convinced that Lisa wouldn't have caught up with the Techie.
They pushed the door closed behind them before Rose snatched the device from Tosh and pressed it against the door again to reverse the process and lock it behind them.
She could see Lisa step through the first gate and crouched down so she couldn't be seen through the window, as Tosh leant her back against the door panting for breath. Adrenaline and fear made her hands shake.
The door's bolts slammed back into place just as Lisa's arm tore through the small glass window, curling around and grasping at Tosh's neck. The techie's scream had Rose leaping backwards, her gun lifting instinctively, and without hesitation, she pulled the trigger. Once, twice, three times, before the Cyber unit released Tosh, letting the woman stagger away as it drew its arm back, now slick and red with blood.
There was a moment in which Lisa stared at Rose with the cold disinterest of a Cyberman, before Rose pulled the trigger once more. A moment too late, as the unit turned and stepped back, and the bullet missed.
"You alright?" Rose asked, and she had to glance at Tosh to see the woman nodding, shakily. "Come on then we can't waste any time. They're counting on us," she growled, her frustration over the missed opportunity evident, but Tosh seemed too shaken to call her on her tone as the pair turned for the stairs and began to climb.
They didn't slow down once they reached reception, and Rose quickly fell to her knees and helped Tosh pull out the board she needed, handed the batteries to Tosh, and then resisted the urge to pace while the woman worked.
Tosh lay on the floor and tugged at wires in, what seemed to Rose, an entirely random manner. Detaching some and reattaching others, muttering instructions to herself under her breath.
Rose couldn't help her, all she could do was keep her gun on the door back into the hub and strain her hearing for any sound of an approaching Cyber unit.
After what felt like eternity, both tube-like batteries suddenly lit up a cold blue colour, and Tosh beamed at them, sighing out a soft, relieved, "Yes!"
"Up and Running?"
"Just about," Tosh answered, and Rose helped the woman to her feet with her free hand.
"Good, now to head for the water tower, and hope they were able to hold out," Rose muttered, sighing when she saw the worry on Tosh's features.
They made a beeline for the single spot in the plaza that still contained a trace of the Tardis' perception filter around it, but by the time they were approaching, their four teammates were already stumbling off the lift in various injured states, and Tosh let out a cry of relief, "Oh! It worked!"
The pair slowed their run as they approached, and Rose heard her ask what had happened, but it seemed no one was quite able to answer her questions just yet. Moments later, answers didn't seem to matter as much when Rose spotted Ianto's distraught features. She quickly tried to move and intercept the pending eruption, but she was too slow.
The blow Ianto aimed at Jack's jaw landed with a loud crack before she could reach them, but her hands against his chest halted any further momentum. Her arms shook slightly as they absorbed some of the pressure Ianto leant into her touch, even as Jack was sent stumbling back from the blow.
"Alright, that's enough now," she murmured, her voice soft. His pain was almost palpable and she couldn't bring herself to truly criticise the man, but Ianto barely seemed to be aware of her presence.
"You could have saved her!" He shouted over her shoulder, his words aimed at Jack and Rose sighed sadly. "You're worse than anything locked up down there. One day, I'll have the chance to save you, and I'll watch you suffer and die!"
Rose could hear Jack moving now, and quickly turned sideways, one hand still pressed to Ianto's chest and her other outstretched to halt Jack's approach, but Gwen was already holding the Captain back as he snarled his response, blood leaking from his mouth.
"It was the only thing that would stop her!"
"It's alright, Jack! Let it go," Rose asked gently, before turning back to Ianto. "I know you're hurting, but I promise you, if there had been any way to save her, I'd have been the first in line to help you," Rose told him softly, but Ianto just shook his head in denial.
"Listen," Tosh said suddenly, stepping between the two men, her head spinning to each in turn, "when Rose and I were in reception, I managed to trip the lockdown timer."
Rose went pale and her eyes widened, spinning away from Ianto to focus on Tosh, "You didn't," she breathed, and Tosh just grinned with innocent delight, thrilled that she had been able to help.
"The power should be coming back on any second. We can get back inside!"
"No!" Rose groaned, and in any other situation, Tosh's face falling into shock would have been the height of hilarity, but now Rose could only spin back to Ianto as the man took off towards reception, with the rest of Torchwood running after him, shouting for him to stop.
"Who knew a man in a tight suit could run this fast," Rose managed to gasp as they spun around a corner, "he could give the Doctor a challenge."
Owen was nearly able to snag hold of the back of Ianto's jacket, but the Welshman put forth a sudden burst of speed and avoided his grasp.
"Ianto, stop!" Jack shouted as their feet hit the boardwalk, but he ignored them all.
"I used my initiative, I'm sorry!" Tosh cried, and Rose bit back the sharp retort on the tip of her tongue. If she'd only said something, Rose could have told her it was a bad idea.
"If I want you to think for yourself, I'll tell you!" Jack snarled instead.
"Maybe if you'd told me your plan, I wouldn't have done it!" Tosh returned, clearly upset, but now wasn't the time.
"Argue later, catch Ianto now!" Rose snapped at both of them, refocusing their attention on the chase.
By the time they burst into the reception, Ianto had grabbed his firearm from behind the desk and all five of them ground to a halt as he pressed his back to the false wall and aimed the weapon at them.
"Ianto, don't be stupid!" Gwen gasped, and Owen already had his hands in the air.
"I've nothing left to lose," he responded calmly, and alarm bells went off in the back of Rose's mind as she stepped forward, a hand on Gwen's shoulder pushing the woman back a step.
"There's always something more to lose, Ianto," Rose told him, her voice purposefully gentle. She could feel Jack's hand on her arm trying to pull her away from the gun, but she shook him off without taking her eyes from Ianto's tearful blue ones.
"I'm going back in to save her, Rose. You have to let me try," he all but begged and she pressed her lips together as she considered him.
"How?" she asked softly. Maybe, if she could get him to think about it, he'd realise it was impossible, but she hadn't counted on Jack's lack of patience.
"You can't!" Jack snapped and Rose flinched at the hard and unyielding tone in his voice, watching in frustration as the gun shifted from her to Jack, knowing in her gut that had been her friends' intention.
"Anybody tries to stop me, I'll shoot them."
Ianto's warning was for all of them, but his eyes were locked on Jack and his meaning was clear. He was more than willing to shoot Jack, and that was something Rose couldn't, and wouldn't, allow.
Faster than she'd thought possible, Rose took a step forward, grasped the gun, pushed Ianto's arm up so that the single shot he got off hit the ceiling, and then she twisted his arm, forcing him to let go of the weapon.
As it clattered against the floor, Rose spun him around and slammed him against the false wall with his arm pinned to his back and her own firearm pressing against the back of his head lightly.
She kicked the gun back towards Jack and sighed, even as Ianto struggled and began crying in denial at the sudden change of circumstances.
"I'm sorry, Ianto, but I can't let you hurt my friends any more than you'd be willing to let us hurt Lisa," Rose told him, her voice still gentle and calm despite the firm grip she had on his arm.
"Get off me!" Ianto spat between clenched teeth, and Rose took a moment to brace herself against his struggling frame.
"I can't do that, because you need to understand the situation you're in right now. Any other day I'd be willing to let you take your time absorbing what's going on. In processing it, and coming to terms with it all, because you have no idea how many times I've seen people go through what you're going through right now," Rose told him, her voice never faltered and she was sure everyone could hear the fine note of unwavering steel that she'd let thread its way through her words.
"Lisa. Is. Dead," she told him. The words were hard, unyielding, but kind in their simplicity, and Ianto let out a soft moan of denial as Rose shook her head.
"I'm sorry, but it's true. I can make a good guess about what happened. She was hooked up to some kind of life support, right? Was still very much herself. We saw the man you invited into Torchwood, so my guess would be that he was some kind of doctor specialising in Cybernetics. The first step to disconnecting any kind of cybernetic implant is to have the biological processes take back full control of the body, but at some point in the process, Lisa flatlined—"
"She came back though! She started breathing on her own!" Ianto growled over his shoulder, and Rose sighed heavily.
"No, she didn't. I've supervised dozens of procedures exactly like that. The moment the body fails, the cybernetics kick in on autopilot and take over, they reanimate the now dead body and any part that was human ceases to exist—"
"But she still remembers her name, her memories, me..." Ianto pleaded, and Rose swallowed hard to keep her voice steady in the face of his grief.
"The Cyber unit was online and cataloguing information the entire time Lisa was hooked up to a life support machine. It had access to all her memories, but it's not her. All you're seeing now is her corpse, reanimated and walking around, and being controlled by a computer chip in her brain," Rose said coldly, and Ianto sobbed as she left him no room to argue.
Rose released his arm and spun his now limp and unresisting body around so she could meet his shattered blue eyes with her own hard brown ones, grasping the collar of his shirt just to make sure he didn't go anywhere before she was finished, her gun still aimed at his head.
"If you want to go back in there you need to go in with the intention of killing the Cyber unit trapped inside.
"No... There's no way..."
"You brought this down on us! You hid her! You hid yourself from us!" Jack snarled, and Rose's head twitched to the side slightly in response to his harsh words.
"That's enough, Jack."
"There was silence behind her, and Rose returned her attention back to Ianto. "I'm sorry. You have no idea just how much, but the woman you are in love with has been dead since the moment she flat-lined. If you go in, it has to be to put it down."
"You can't order me to do that," Ianto said, his voice flat and despairing and Rose narrowed her eyes.
"I understand if you can't put a bullet in the head of something wearing her body like a new outfit," she said, continuing to hammer home the message she was trying to get him to accept, "but if you can't do it then you need to step aside and let us finish this. Stop getting in our way because it's not just us you're risking. It's the entire planet, the entire universe if the Cybermen get off-world," she told him, studying his heartbreak with as much clinical detachment as she could manage.
Rose had tried being understanding. She'd tried being nice. But now, they were running out of time.
"You'll execute her, or I'll execute you both!" Jack snarled, and Rose growled.
"I said enough!"
"You can't make me!" Ianto snapped back, his attention turned from Rose. Jack's rage gave him something to argue with and fight against that Rose's cool logic did not, and Rose could feel the progress she'd made getting through to him slipping away.
"You like to think you're a hero, Jack, but you're the biggest monster of all!"
There was a long beat of silence before Rose lowered her gun. "Ianto, stay out here. Tosh, Owen, both of you watch him—"
"No," Jack stopped her, his voice like ice as he kicked Ianto's gun back towards him. "You have ten minutes to finish this, then we're coming in. Pick it up."
Ianto stared at him for a long moment, before doing as instructed. He let his eyes settle on Rose for a long moment, and she held his gaze, her expression open, and honest, and he flinched before turning and heading back down into the main hub where the Cyber unit waited as Tosh turned on Jack, shocked.
"How can you ask him—"
"I don't need your opinion!"
"Enough! All of you!" Rose cut off the argument building between Tosh and Jack quickly, the last thing they needed was bad feelings brewing. "Tosh, he wanted to go back down there. Once he is, then it's up to Ianto whether he shoots or not, and Jack... Calm the hell down!" Rose growled.
Owen paced the room and glanced up at the clock with a sigh, "Well, only another nine minutes and thirty seconds to go," he muttered and Rose frowned.
"We're not waiting for ten minutes, we're going in five," she said, and Jack frowned.
"I said—"
"And I'm telling you, ten minutes is too long. If she's dead, you don't want him alone down there for that long, and if she's alive, then in ten minutes he'll either have killed her and been grieving, alone, or she'll have upgraded him and we'll have two Cyber units to deal with. We go down in five," Rose ordered, eyes narrowing at Jack's stubborn glare, but eventually, he threw his hands in the air in surrender.
"Fine! Five minutes."
"Three and a half, now," Owen muttered, and Rose shot the doctor a grateful smile for his attempt at lightening the mood.
Three and a half minutes crawled by before they finally followed Ianto down into the hub and the first thing they did was stop by the now unlocked armoury, only staying long enough to make sure they all had a weapon and several sets of spare ammo.
With no sign of Lisa in the main hub, beyond the blood, the five of them moved through Torchwood Three, clearing rooms methodically but heading, inexorably, down to the location of the conversion unit.
Rose had a bad feeling about the stack of dropped pizza boxes she'd spotted in the hub, but after pointing them out to Jack neither of them had alerted the rest of the team, and Rose had been keeping up a constant stream of silent prayers that they weren't now dealing with three Cyber units.
They heard Ianto before they even reached the final room, his howling sobs of anguish echoing through the corridors and tearing into Rose's heart.
"Is... is she dead?" Gwen whispered, but Rose shrugged a shoulder.
"Don't relax until we know for sure," was the only advice she could give and slowly they approached the doorway to the storeroom Ianto had been keeping Lisa in for months.
Kneeling on the floor over the bleeding body of Lisa was the sobbing Ianto, and slowly the group of five came to a halt in the corridor outside, and Rose took a position where she could see the grieving man and a good portion of the room beyond him.
"Ianto?" came a soft Welsh voice from the shadows, and Rose saw the man in question shoot to his feet, gun aimed and a single hand command from her had the rest of the Torchwood team pressed against the walls of the corridor as they waited to see what was happening, and how it would play out.
"Ianto, it's me. It's Lisa," came the soft voice, and Rose let her eyes fall closed, even as Jack looked over at her, his questions about what was happening clear in his eyes.
"I'm human again," the voice said, and Rose opened her eyes, scanning them over the faces of her team and absorbing the mixtures of shock and horror she could feel swirling under her own skin.
"You fought so hard for me, I had to hold on for you, so I took this body and transplanted the brain."
She'd moved around the room now, and Rose could see the young woman whose life Lisa had stolen, and the pizza delivery uniform that told Rose how Lisa had gotten her newest form. Short, blonde, young and pretty. Years of potential snuffed out and Rose had to wonder if Lisa's love for Ianto had truly broken through the Cyber systems. She could remember no case of a Cyber unit returning to the human one-point-oh design. It was inferior, and yet, that was what Lisa had chosen to do.
It was evil and abhorrent, and if Ianto had loved someone capable of that kind of cruelty, then Rose decided he had horrific taste in women, but the choice was unprecedented among Cyber units, and so Rose held the team back and waited.
If she was human, she could be jailed for her crimes, but execution was reserved for aliens too dangerous to allow on Earth.
"You're not Lisa!" Ianto sobbed, and Rose could just see him around the edge of the door as he stepped back, glancing between the face he knew lying dead on the floor, and the woman standing before him. It felt so much like her own reaction to the Doctor's regeneration that, for a long moment, Rose couldn't breathe.
"You always said you didn't love me for what I looked like," Lisa said, a soft laugh at the end belied her nerves, and Rose felt her jaw drop open. That had sounded like emotion. Genuine emotion, and if she could feel...
Rose remembered her first visit to the parallel world, when the Doctor had deactivated the Cybermen's emotional inhibitors, and the pain had driven them all mad.
Maybe Lisa's strongest emotion had been love, instead of pain. Removing the Cybernetics by transplanting the brain into a human body might have broken the connection, Rose theorised, her mind running ahead, but there wasn't enough information. Still, she wasn't going to shoot until the blonde claiming to be Lisa made some show that her connection to the Cyber unit was still intact.
She listened to the woman reel off memories, accurate memories if Ianto's sounds of heartbroken despair were anything to go by, but even that Rose couldn't trust. The Cyber unit would have had full access to Lisa's memories. She'd told Ianto that, but faced with a human body, a gentle voice, and stories of their shared history, Rose wasn't able to blame him when Ianto lowered his gun at the woman's soft plea's.
"Hold me Ianto. I need you to hold me. I need you to tell me it's alright."
Rose watched Ianto's resolve crumble as he fell against the dead girl, sobbing into her shoulder, but Rose kept her eyes fixed on the expression on the woman's face. The emotions seemed real, and Rose bit her lip as she considered the situation carefully.
If Lisa really had managed to break the connection just by taking the brain, the only human part of a Cyberman left, and placing it back into a human body, it made Rose wish for a way to contact the parallel world and bring a whole new context to organ donation. People whose life support machines were due to be turned off could save the lives of those still trapped in Cybernetic bodies.
But there was no way to contact them, and Rose forced herself to refocus because although hope was bubbling in her chest for Ianto, experience was whispering in the back of her mind that this was all too neat and well packaged to be believable.
The sound of a gun being cocked snapped her eyes back to the scene in the next room, and she saw that Ianto had taken a step back and aimed his weapon at the woman who held his heart in her hands.
"What are you doing?" Lisa asked, tears choking her voice, and Rose went cold. She wasn't sure she could have pulled the trigger in the face of that tear-filled gaze, and asking Ianto to was cruel.
"Ianto, it's me. You wouldn't shoot me. " Her voice was shaking now, but Rose could hear the doubt in her words and her heart was racing.
"I did this... for you..." Lisa said simply, and Rose let her own tears fall because somehow that made it all that much worse. Ianto hadn't wanted her to kill some innocent girl, surely Lisa would have known that, and as heartfelt as that confession seemed, it convinced Rose that this wasn't as much Lisa as it had portrayed itself to be. There was still more machine than human standing before Ianto, despite all evidence to the contrary.
"I'm s-sorry... I'm sorry..." Ianto sobbed, his voice breaking and still Rose hesitated.
She knew she was clinging to the hope that she was wrong, and when Jack shifted, she glared at him, halting his movements a moment longer.
Ianto dropped his weapon and turned away from the desecrated girl standing before him, but even though he couldn't pull the trigger his pure unadulterated grief told Rose that he'd finally accepted that Lisa was gone.
"We can be upgraded together!" the Cyber unit offered, and Rose nodded firmly. Hand signalling the rest of the Torchwood team, she and Jack pushed the doors wide and all five of them stood in the doorway and on Jack's count took aim.
Rose pulled her trigger first, not wanting Ianto to be able to blame Jack for it later, and soon the sound of gunfire echoed around the room as one by one they emptied their clips into the soft flesh body that the Cyber unit was inhabiting.
To a man, they were stony-faced. Sad but determined. Having seen first hand the lengths to which the Cybermen would go to manipulate the human race into surrendering when they were unable to convert by force. There was no joy or triumph in the moment, only necessary duty and Ianto's tangible waves of grief as he fell to his knees between Lisa's body and her brain, both finally dead.
All of them lowered their guns, and Rose slowly approached Ianto and knelt beside him. Her arm went around his shaking frame and he collapsed against her shoulder limply, with sobs racking his body as he surrendered to his grief and the tension that had been holding the room hostage evaporated.
She could almost feel the rest of the team breathe a sigh of relief that it was finally over.
Rose let her hand rub soothingly over Ianto's shoulders as she turned her eyes on Jack and met his hard gaze, his expression softening in the face of whatever he saw there and she offered him a weak smile.
He returned it with a soft nod and holstered his gun, before ushering the other three back up to the main hub and letting Rose comfort the destroyed man in private.