Chapitre 161 - Smiling Wizardy

The splash text reads “The fates of two worlds ... by the two boys”. 

In which we have Watanuki and Lava Lamp and their MYSTERY CONNECTION taking the sole focus. CLAMP keep dropping hints about these two but without any connecting details that are concrete enough to properly play with, but you better believe the Sakura tree is significant in some way. Am I hoping the connection is more to do with Sakura (who they’ve both met now) than Literally Anyone (who has already technically killed a Syaoran in a Sakura tree already)? YOU BET. Am I certain? NOT AT ALL. 

But that aside, the image presents them almost as two sides of the same coin; two halves of the same image, just as xxxholic and Tsubasa are two halves of the same interconnected story. They get one diagonal half of the image each but they don’t visually overlap with each other - just as they don’t overlap in either manga yet. They haven’t properly met on screen, though their connection is deep enough for Lava Lamp to heavily contribute to Watanuki’s survival and be consistently worried about his well being. He KNOWS things, and here we see him deeply concerned and looking down out of frame. There is a plethora of terrible things he’s dealing with, and really, he’s young enough that it’s a tragedy from start to finish. 

By contrast Watanuki is (perhaps intentionally) ignorant of all these things, and so looks skyward with a more gentle awareness. He could be seeing something (as he has that power) but it’s not as concrete as the truths Lava Lamp is plagued with. He hasn’t figured it out yet, so he’s still visibly calm and much more relaxed than the cramped hand posture Lava Lamp has. I suspect memory shenanigans, but then again maybe it’s also something to do with his “not quite existing” status. Who knows where he came from, or which timeline, or why he ended up here.