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Hoshimachi Suisei and Sakura Miko meet.
What happens next?
If you want a happy ending, try A.
A.
Suisei and Miko fall in love. They get married. Buy a charming house. They have worthwhile and fulfilling jobs which they find exciting and enjoyable. They go on vacations together. They retire and discover hobbies that they find exciting and enjoyable. Eventually, they die. This is the end of the story.
B.
Suisei falls in love with Miko, and Miko falls in love with Usada Pekora. None of them are yet ready to settle down.
Suisei knows Miko really only spends time with her out of pity and the lack of a better option. She's getting busier and busier and Thursdays are the only day she can get away to go out and play with Miko. She's breaking into the mainstream music field, but Miko isn't in love with her, she's in love with Pekora, who has the brightest freest laugh and a charming way of worming into one's heart. But Pekora is away being free, and freedom isn't the same for Miko, so in the meantime she spends Thursdays with Suisei.
It's not too bad for Miko. Sure, the way Suisei's eyes soften and shine at her feels like expectations stacked higher and higher on her shoulders, but Miko really has no one else to go out with and on the whole, she has a fairly good time.
One day Pekora sweeps back into the scene and raises a tailwind like a hurricane, and this time Miko leaves with her, leaves Suisei's bone-crushing affection behind. Suisei's hardly in any position to be jealous, but nevertheless she sinks into despair. She takes a vacation and stays at a charming house by the seashore, saying she needs to cheer herself up - this is the thin part of the plot, but it can be dealt with later - and disappears into the sea and leaves nothing behind, not even a note.
Miko, after a suitable period of mourning, marries Pekora. Everything continues as in A, but under different names.
C.
Miko falls in love with Suisei, but Suisei doesn't fall in love with Miko. Sure, they're the closest friends anyone could think of, Suisei comes to Miko's apartment twice a week and Miko comes to Suisei's twice the next week and they cook together and play games and talk late into the night, you'll notice that Suisei never lets Miko stay over, and after they've eaten dinner Miko goes to do the dishes when it's her turn so Suisei doesn't think she's unclean, having all those dirty dishes lying around, and Suisei dozes off on Miko's sofa before she shakes herself awake and flees with a hurried thank you, and she doesn't even notice the blanket Miko's covered her with or the way she's lined up Suisei's shoes neatly next to her own. But it's okay. Suisei is busy and must not have time to sleep enough and Miko pretends she's flattered that Suisei can fall asleep around her like it's because she feels safe and not because she's too exhausted to deal with Miko's antics. And Miko comes to her more and more because surely if they repeat this routine enough Suisei will get used to her and come to depend on her and they'll fall in love, but Suisei never, never fails to leave on routine and three days later they repeat the same cycle.
Miko starts losing hope. Crying is good for your eyelashes, anyway, and she's slowly being whittled away by this relationship that seems so ambiguous only to her. Her friends start to notice. They tell her to confess and move forward and Miko says no at once because she knows that Suisei does not love her back but still hopes foolishly, and if she gets rejected she's not quite sure what she will do.
She watches the stars in Suisei's eyes and pretends that she doesn't notice that those eyes are growing more distant from her the more she clings to Suisei.
Her friends tell her they've seen Suisei out playing with another girl, whose name is Inui Toko. Suisei, meanwhile, starts missing their weekly appointments. It's not even Toko who finally gets to Miko; it's the dates. Suisei has never taken her out to play in their long, long friendship, and now she's spending all that time she used to spend with Miko, with Toko. Miko collects all the sleeping pills and aspirins she can find, and takes them and downs as much alcohol as she can reach to wash it down. She leaves a note for Suisei. She still hopes that Suisei will come over to surprise her, find her, get her to the hospital in time and then they have time to fall in love, but this fails to happen.
Suisei and Toko continue as in A.
D.
Suisei and Toko have no problems. They get along well and are good at working out the little difficulties that do arise. But their charming house is by the seashore - remember, that seashore? It seems that Suisei has a penchant for it - and one day a giant tidal wave approaches. Real estate values go down. The rest of the story is how Suisei and Toko escape from it, and continue as in A.
E.
Yes, but Toko suddenly has pressing matters in the underworld that must be addressed and may not return for millennia. The rest of the story is about how kind and understanding they are, they both are, and Suisei patiently waits for centuries until the end of A. If you like, it can be an everlasting pining for Toko, and Toko comes to the living world to meet her for the first time in fifteen hundred years and finds her gone.
F.
If you think this is all too bourgeoisie, make Suisei a revolutionary and Toko a counterespionage agent and see how far that gets you. You'll still end up with A, though in between you will get a passionate, brawling narrative of a love affair in the midst of a civil war.
You have to face it, the endings are the same. That's how the story goes, written out so clearly from start to finish that it couldn't possibly go any other way. Like chess pieces all moving along their set paths, growing and changing but ultimately ending up at the same outcome.
So much for endings, just the culmination of a what after a what after a what. Suisei and Miko. Miko and Pekora. Suisei and Toko. Beginnings are always more fun.
G.
Fresh off of a breakup Hoshimachi Suisei meets Sakura Miko in a park amidst the snow and decides that the night sky isn't quite so terrible to stare at mournfully in the middle of winter after all. Miko tells her it's not always terrible that the most obvious is what becomes true or that the ending will be the same. That's where they kiss for the first time, too; under the snow-born halos of streetlights, not quite cliche but exhilarating enough to feel like this is the true love story, no Pekoras or Tokos included. As if kissing her, being with her, Suisei and Miko and Miko and Suisei, is the most natural and obvious thing in the world.