#TLDR: SAKURA'S IN A TUBE AND I DON'T KNOW WHAT IT MEANS BUT IT WAS FORESHADOWED FOREVER

[completeoveranalysis]

[3]

Let’s go back for a second. 

Because these pages from Chapter 141 are horrifyingly literal now that we know that the Thing Sakura wanted to make happen was this. 

Sakura is cold and determined in what she wants. You couldn’t be anything else under the circumstances, but still, it’s chilling when Fai promises to make it happen. Because oh boy did he make it happen. Worse, “your wish is what I wish” is now so vividly false that Sakura’s hard gaze as she watches him say the words is awful. 

Bonus though: Fai was absolutely correct in guessing that it would be something that would anger Kurogane. Because yeah that was pretty accurate. 

But in hindsight I don’t think my incorrect assumption that Sakura would have ghost assumptions was something I just made up. In her conversation with Yuuko, Sakura says this:

The implication was that she was going on a journey. She intended to go find Syaoran before the others could catch up with her. 

It didn’t occur to me that this changed by the time she had her next conversation with Yuuko. When she got to Infinity, she knew more about the situation. She knew, I think, that she was already in the place of her vision of the future. Sakura said something like “I’m running out of time”, and so that was when she altered her plan and introduced the second wish - to skip the journey and go straight to the final destination 

I’m not sure how the soul bottle is the destination worthy of trading so much just yet, but at the very least it’s still better than the future Sakura originally saw. As @evig-sang has pointed out to me (and I’m not gonna post the actual picture purely because of the blood, but you can click on it here) the images we get of Sakura’s vision are the same reactions that happen here. The future Sakura saw still happened - she knew Fai was going to stab her right from the off, the only thing she was changing was what happened to her afterwards. Instead of properly dying, her soul just gets forwarded to the tea decanter of destiny. 

Which was also alluded to in that moment right before their final battle. 

Which we’ve talked about before, but it’s a deliberate callback to this:

And so deliberately (in hindsight) mirror the fact that Sakura knows exactly where she’s going and what she wants to happen. 

The only thing that still gets me is the entire situation surrounding that scene in the first place. 

I understand nothing about this yet, but Sakura is sure that her presence in the tube means that they can save the future. 

Which, further, means she saw more than just the final battle and her death. She’s seen what’s coming later, and she wants to change that, too. 

The bit that gets me stuck is; is this original scene in the tube from the past, or the future? Is it what’s going to happen, or (like the text originally implied) was it the start of everything, before this entire journey started?

Or? Is it more complicated than either of those answers?