  Recent experimental results on the Lambda_c/D^0 ratio in proton-proton
collisions have revealed a significant enhancement compared to expectations
based on universal fragmentation fractions/functions across different colliding
systems, from e+e- to pp. This unexpected enhancement has sparked speculation
about the potential effects of a deconfined medium impacting hadronization,
previously considered exclusive to heavy-ion collisions. In this study, we
propose a novel approach that assumes the formation of a small, deconfined, and
expanding fireball even in pp collisions, where charm quarks can undergo
rescattering and hadronization. We make use of the same in-medium hadronization
mechanism developed for heavy-ion collisions, which involves local
color-neutralization through recombination of charm quarks with nearby opposite
color charges from the background fireball. Our model incorporates the presence
of diquark excitations in the hot medium, which promotes the formation of
charmed baryons. Moreover, 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. We show that 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 supporting evidence that the collective
phenomena observed in small systems naturally have the same origin as those
observed in heavy-ion collisions
