Watching is important to know and fully understand not only your surroundings, but others, and even yourself. For instance, if you like watching a certain type of television show--like, say a science-fiction-themed television show or movie--it tells a lot about who you are and what you are like. Chances are, the person watching a science-fiction television show would not like the same things a person who watches a teen drama.

Watching is important to science. Observations lead to questions, questions lead to experiments, experiments lead to answers, answers lead to more knowledge on the universe we live in.

Watching can also be an invasion of privacy. Watching at the wrong time, with the wrong person, in the wrong place, and you could be faced with harsh punishment, anger, maybe even fear. It can cause one to become an outcast, a villain.

Watching can be the thing that brings people together and tear them apart.

Watching can be the catalyst to action.

Watching was how he learned of his existance.

(----------)

Gabriel Gray had grown up the only child in a two-bedroom apartment. A child of a shot gun marriage. The son of a watchmaker who abandoned his wife and 19-year-old son before said son could go off to college and break free from the "time-honored tradition" that was his father's shop.

Gabriel Gray had grown up doing nothing but fixing clocks, reading, and watching others. When he was child, he would watch from the sandbox, only an arm's length away from his fidgety mother. He would desire to play with the children on the play gym, but it was too dangerous. His mother worried over his "fragile" bones and his "delicate" skin, insisting that the sandbox was the best and safest place to play. When he was in school, he would try he would stand by the windows and watch the other children play the games he never learned how to play while the nun-teachers made him clap erasers because of an act that he did not commit. When he was an adolescent and young teenager, he would watch from behind a book, watching the bullies who stole his money from him as they sat laughing with their friends and the girls who crushed on them. And when he was a young man, he would watch from a dark corner in disgusted pleasure as the wrestling team practiced. With their tight unitards and their grunts and their sweat-sheened bodies and...

And as an adult, he would sit behind the counter of his father's shop and watch the people pass by, not looking at him, not giving the dark little shop a second thought. Not caring about the lonely man who sat inside.

(----------)

Gabriel Gray always watched.

It was Sylar who always acted on the impulses that Gabriel had.

Gabriel Gray was always the lonely watchmaker with the thick glasses and the ugly sweater-vests and the over-protective mother and the unsupportive father and the crappy life.

It was Sylar who was always the one to go to the clubs, wearing tight-fitting clothes and who had the toothy grin that attracted both sexes and who had no past to hold him back.

But it was Gabriel Gray who first saw and fell in love with Mohinder Suresh.

(----------)

Gabriel Gray had never been fond of coffee shops. But he had run out at home that morning and decided that going out to the grocery store would take too much time. He had just walked in when he saw him and where Gabriel first felt his heartbeat speed up and slow down and break at the exact same time. Gabriel wanted to shout for joy and praise the God he had given up on many, many years ago and at the same time mourn for the fact that he would never be worth enough to even have a conversation with him. He wanted to touch that smooth coffee skin and smell those black curls, but at the same time wanted to avoid the man altogether.

He'd never felt this way before.

And he didn't even know the man's name.

He stuck around, sitting at a table, staring, watching, wondering, until finally the most beautiful name he might have ever heard--Mohinder--was called and the Indian man recieved his drink.

(----------)

Gabriel Gray returned to that coffee shop everyday. After a week, he figured out the pattern of his obsession.

Monday, Wednesday, and Friday, Mohinder came to the coffee shop between seven and nine o'clock in the morning. Tuesday and Thursday he came around three in the afternoon. Saturday and Sunday he didn't even bother to come. Gabriel followed this schedule to the very letter. He figured that one day, he would scrounge up enough courage to talk to that beautiful man.

He never could.

(----------)

Gabriel Gray created Sylar, at first, as a way to not be Gabriel Gray.

Sylar was everything Gabriel Gray wasn't: confident, attractive, open, unafraid, mysterious, exotic. He was, in Gabriel's mind, the perfect man.

After a while, he decided that a perfect man could easily capture the heart of another.

(----------)

Gabriel Gray only acknowledged his religion around Mohinder. Praying to God that he would turn and say something to him; that Mohinder would see him, blush, and feel the instant attraction that Gabriel had felt that first day. But again, God prooved why Gabriel had given up his roots when he discovered that no matter how good of a person he was, he was going to go to hell.

(----------)

Gabriel Gray discovered he had a chance at happiness the day he heard Mohinder arguing with someone over the phone.

"I don't want to go!" Pause. "Because dance clubs are completely useless! Who would want to go to a dark, crowded room that smells of body odor and move around like you're sexually harrassing the three people next to you?" Pause. "Of course you would." Pause and a sigh. "I know you guys want to do something nice for me since it's my birthday, but I would rather we not go someplace so...impersonal." A longer pause. "What do you mean I have no fun in my life? I have tons of fun!" Pause. "That is a regular kind of--" Pause. "I do have soul and it is full of joy and elation and fun and--" Angered pause. "Fine, I'll come. But I'm not going to like it."

Gabriel had listened intently to the entire conversation. As Mohinder was writting down the location and time of the apparent birthday celebration, Gabriel got up and walked over, under the guise of having to get a napkin. Gabriel was able to look over Mohinder's shoulder. The words were in a different written language, but Mohinder had been repeating what was being told to him.

Gabriel walked back to his seat, heart pumping like the stereos he was going to be surrounded by that night.