Look, ancestors of Alabasta, upon your king and weep. Your new king is content to reign over your ruins and ashes and shattered descendants.
This is the end and this is the beginning. This is the final resting place of the last of Crocodile's enemies. Here they will be buried with the history of this country, as will its worthless sons and daughters aboveground, and all will be remade in Crocodile's image; barren, defeated from within and without...
But the Straw Hat kid still rises. Still refuses to be quiet. "Bold words from someone about to die," says Crocodile, unsure if he's not directing those words at himself as well. That's no reason to let himself slip, though. Silence the interloper, shut his mouth about his foolish dreams. The longer Crocodile takes, the weaker his fury burns. His blood spills over the fallen ancient pillars, but that sort of pain is easily shrugged off. Although he could have escaped any time and denied his enemy the chance to fight, there is another kind of ache in him that has kept him rooted to the temple's stone floor all along.
I'm not wrong about this, he wants to say. All that I told you about dreams and hope is true. And Straw Hat forces him off the floor with strength that cannot sustain Crocodile. Defeats him with a power that is beyond his comprehension. Proves him wrong in a way that won't stop gnawing at him because of how alien and indecipherable the truth of it is. Very well... let this be the kid's victory, then. Let time be the enemy that will bring him low and cut him down. Let him taste despair when it comes to him, and inevitably it will, for this world spares no one.
Ever the silver medallist, Crocodile accepts his loss there and then, without grudge, without anger. Before his mind goes dark and his body gives up, there's regret, maybe even relief; there's the death of his second dream come at the dawn of its realisation, here in the ruins of Alabasta.