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Early April 2009: Fire Lord Ozai burns and banishes his son, Prince Zuko before sending him on a wild goose chase for the avatar and tossing him on a boat to Boston with zero resources. Meanwhile: Nathan Ford is (against all odds) sober for once in his life, Sophie Deveraux’s acting career is proceeding with all of its usual skill, Alec Hardison is hacking into the White House email because he’s bored, Parker is stealing the hope diamond for the third time that month (she’s trying to beat her previous time), and Eliot Spencer’s is up to some hinky stuff in Pakistan.
Zuko lands in Boston, Nate gets a job interview, rehearsals are plodding along for the Sound of Music, Hardison contemplates hacking into the Pentagon for fun, Parker plots how to steal the crown jewels off the queen's head, and Eliot heads back to the good ole US of A.
Zuko is scraping by in Boston. The crew drags Nate back into a life a crime.
Parker comes back to her warehouse from a job in Nebraska and finds a kid trying to break into it. He’s doing a terrible job of it (it’s not like he could succeed against the sort of security systems that she’s got in place) but he’s got potential and part of him hits closer to home than she’s willing to admit. She decides to take him on as her protege. (She doesn’t tell the rest of the team.)
Zuko isn’t sure what he’s stumbled into. He was just looking for a place to hide in but this warehouse is weird and the woman who lives in it is even weirder. She’s offering him food and a place to stay though and he knows that he has to find the avatar but doing stuff on his own is hard and it’s nice to just stay in one place for once. (He isn’t super sure about everything the weird woman insists on teaching him, but interesting and she doesn’t get mad when he doesn’t get it right away.)
The team pulls a job in a hospital.
Nate, with every ounce of controlling bastardry he’s gained with his newfound sobriety, notices that Parker’s hiding something. He confronts her about it. It rapidly turns into a mess. Everyone has mixed feelings about Parker just training up this random kid she found to be a thief. Everyone has different ideas about what to do, about what should be done. Parker refuses them all. Zuko's her's, she’s teaching him to be a thief and she’s not going to stop. Somehow, at the end of all the chaos, everyone’s met him and started to adopt him in their head already so they don’t make Parker stop teaching him. Instead, he becomes their joint protege (slash son, but no one’s quite ready to admit that yet.)
The Fairy Godparent’s job is the first one he helps out with. (After all, who better to help infiltrate a school than a child?) Slowly, he gets more comfortable with them. Slowly, he becomes a better thief, picking up bits and pieces from everyone. (He’s terrible at anything resembling a grift, but he’s more comfortable with technology than Eliot is and he was Parker’s protege first.) Zuko still thinks about finding the avatar, but less. And besides, he’s learning skills that will help him find the avatar.
They steal a reporter’s sanity, pose as magicians to infiltrate a food company, and pull all the other cons that go in between episodes. And then the Two Live Crew Job happens. Zuko uses his firebending to help Sophie escape the explosion. It’s the first time he’s used his bending in a major way since he was banished. They fake the funeral and usually, Zuko’s not a good actor, but Sophie’s still a little singed (because he wasn’t a good enough fire bender) and it’s hitting just how close he was to losing her and just how much that would hurt. When he cries, it isn’t an act. He’s glad that she isn’t dead. That he didn’t lose her. And then she leaves and it hurts because he lost his mom and his honor and his home and now he’s losing the people who had started to become his family.
Everything’s falling apart. Zuko feels like he should’ve known that this couldn’t have lasted. He starts to go back to researching and searching for the avatar using the skills that he’s learned from everybody else. He breaks into the Fire Nation, Earth Kingdom, and Water Tribe’s embassies and steals the information that they have on the avatar. (If the rest of the crew caught him, they’d all be proud (They’re crime child’s all grown up and committing crimes!) but Zuko’s gotten very good at being sneaky and things are falling apart for the rest of them too.)
Nate starts drinking again. Eliot beats up Sterling. The crew steals a baseball team. Sophie comes back and Nate goes to jail but it’s okay because they’re going to break him out and it’s a relief because they’re not falling apart, not anymore. Sophie leads the crew and Zuko stops breaking into Fire Nation buildings quite as often. Nate breaks out of jail. Seasons 3 and 4 happen roughly the same. Zuko grows up, works through some of his trauma, becomes a better thief, so on and so forth.
(Somewhere in there, the truth about who Zuko is, and how he got his scar comes out. Maybe it’s when Sophie’s telling the rest of the crew her real name so when Nate comes back he’s missed out on even more. Maybe Sterling drops it during one of his inevitable gloating sessions. Maybe Hardison actually gets around to do some digging into the youngest member of their crew one day when he’s bored. I’m not sure how exactly.)
(They don’t decide to run a con on Ozai in the universe. When they learn what happened, they hate Ozai, there’s no doubt about that, but right there, right now? They don’t think that they’re qualified to take down the Fire Lord, it’s just a little much, you know? They do help Zuko look for the avatar though. (Though as to what will happen if they actually find it… Well, everyone has their secrets))
About halfway through season 5, Aang emerges from his iceberg. All of the plans that the Leverage crew has been half-heartedly hatching in the back of their minds meet reality. By this point, Zuko’s realized that, actually, his dad was sort of a dick, and also evil. Anyway, this part’s a lot less fleshed out, but the Leverage crew proceeds with “Let’s steal the Avatar” and the Gaang teams up with the Leverage crew to take down Fire Lord Ozai, bring an end to a hundred years of warmongering in the fire nation, and otherwise kick ass.