I don't know much about stories behind in-game couples, but this is what I've gleaned from the rumor mills about the torrid love affairs of the NPCs.
Milla the stash girl and the unnamed guy by the mast in the Guild Ship.
Milla used to be an aide to a Kraag field marshal during the Dead City campaign. Field commanders and their entourage were more likely to survive lost battles and messy retreats. So on the eve of big critical battles, soldiers often came to her and palmed her small items to pass to their loved ones in the event of their death. There were trinkets like rings and talismans, scarves knitted by sweethearts, handkerchiefs with embroidered initials in the corner, painted photos on tarnished lockets, and letters for parents and wives and children. And so Milla went from battlefields to battlefields, from skirmishes to skirmishes, carrying an ever growing pack of mementos from soldiers, some of whom had been lost, died, or worse, taken captive by the Undead. From time to time Milla would see them: young men or veterans, still wearing tattered Kraag commando gear, maggots crawling in their eye socket, gray rotting flesh peeling off their bones, unintelligible snarls coming out of their mouth as they charged at their former brothers-in-arms. And yet afterward, in tiny rooms full of grieving family all over Kraag, Milla would sit in front of a mother, a wife, the entrusted little memento on the table between them, and say, with absolute conviction, "He died bravely among his troops. We interred his remains in a safe hallowed ground and said prayers for him. The Undeads will never claim him."
Milla completed her tour of duty and went into guild asset protection business. But you can leave the war behind and it will never leave you alone and instead follow you in your nightmares, in your memories. Milla would pass a butcher shop and remember the stench of blood and ordure on the ground where men had been hacked, their entrails spilling out of their belly, trampled by unheeding combatants. She would pass the blacksmith shop and remember the mingled smell of gun powder and singed flesh and the scream of soldiers whose limbs were amputated in crude field hospitals without anesthetics.
So the unnamed guy in the Guild Ship came as a breath of fresh air. Sure he had no memory of anything, not even his name, but Milla thought she too would welcome forgetfulness as a divine blessing when the alternative is being haunted by visions so broken and vivid that they seem more solid and real than the happy peaceful normalcy around you.
The first time she met the unnamed guy, he was eating from a plate given to him by Eva. He chewed thoughtfully, looking rapt and ecstatic. "What is this?" he asked. He had crumbs on his smiling lips.
"Sugar cookie," said Eva.
"Fantastic! This is my favorite cookie!" he said.
"Yesterday it was macaron," giggled Eva to Milla in a whisper.
Milla smiled and thought how refreshing it would be to start every day with a blank sheet of memory, to be filled with things that are always fresh discovery, to be awed every day with wonders that never lose their magic and glamor.
"I don't remember my name," the guy said when Eva introduced Milla to him. "Why don't you give me a name?"
"Hmm, you look like a...a...Peter," said Milla lamely. The name only came to her because she had seen a flying banner that morning and remembered Peter, the marshal's banner bearer, who struggled to keep the Kraag flag from falling to the ground even though the enemy had hacked off his forearms and he was kneeling in a muddy pool of his own blood.
"Nice! Hello Milla, I'm Peter. Nice to meet you," he said smiling.
And for a day Peter was alive and well and they went to town and discovered the wonder of puppet show in the park, fed the pigeons in the plaza, bought paper lanterns and sent them lit up into the night sky. They kissed when they said goodbye for the night.
The next day the guy discovered he loved almond cookies and happily accepted the name Tristan for himself. The Tristan Milla remembered was a frightened boy who lied about his age to join the army so he could be with his older brother. The boy had taken thirteen arrows and died with his head three feet from his corpse, in a desperate charge to cut off Rutger's supply line.
"He won't remember you're his girlfriend tomorrow," warned Eva.
"That's all right," said Milla, fondly watching Tristan throwing bread crumbs to the ducks in the park lake. "That just means he will fall in love with me all over again every day."
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