  We study heavy-flavor hadron production in high-energy pp collisions,
assuming the formation of a small, deconfined and expanding fireball where
charm quarks can undergo rescattering and hadronization. We adopt the same
in-medium hadronization mechanism developed for heavy-ion collisions, which
involves Local Color-Neutralization (LCN) through recombination of charm quarks
with nearby opposite color charges from the background fireball. Diquark
excitations in the hot medium favor the formation of charmed baryons. The
recombination process, involving closely aligned partons from the same fluid
cell, effectively transfers the collective flow of the system to the final
charmed hadrons. This framework can qualitatively reproduce the observed
experimental findings in heavy-flavor particle-yield ratios, $p_T$-spectra and
elliptic-flow coefficients. Our results provide new, complementary support to
the idea that the collective phenomena observed in small systems have the same
origin as those observed in heavy-ion collisions.
