Would it be appropriate to take a reference/inspiration from an orphaned work and incorporate it into your own fic?

The specific situation I'm in is, I write for a rarepair and recently a new fic popped into the tag for my ship from orphan_account. A sweet little fic, and I was so charmed by this specific world building bit that they invented-- the best way I can sum it up for someone not in the fandom is they referred to a real literary figure but made the name a pun based on the naming conventions of the source material. So like if it was a fic about, cats, and someone said something like "This feels like something out of a Catlock Holmes book!" but much more clever and specific than "Catlock Holmes"

Now here I am, writing my own fic for the rarepair which is ongoing and relatively popular (there's a high likelihood the writer of the orphaned fic has read my fic or knows about it, considering how few are out there for this pairing) and... I kinda want to reference that, in my opinion genius piece of world building, in my own fic.

I would happily give a link to the orphaned fic in an authors note to show where I got the inspiration, but I almost have this feeling that authors of orphaned fics might not even want traffic directed at those fics. It's a strange situation in my eyes, because they must have orphaned it shortly after posting... I wasn't even sure if I should comment on the fic, since again, the way I see an orphaned work, would be as a work that the author has cut all ties to... (I did comment by the way, and told them I LOVED the reference, though didn't say anything about possibly using it in my own fic)